CO ^^r LO CO co o JERUSALEM UNDER THE HIGH-PRIESTS FIVE LECTURES ON THE PERIOD BETWEEN NEHEMIAH AND THE NEW TESTAMENT BY EDWYN BE VAN AUTHOR OF "THE HOUSE OF SELEUCUS " THIRD IMPRESSION LONDON EDWARD ARNOLD 1 & 3 MADDOX STREET, BOND STREET W. 1918 [All rights reserved] '. V? To the Very 1(everen8r] KOI 3(X 4 ix. n; xi. 21. 6 xvi. 12. vii. 36. 7 ix. 12 ; xxvii. 29. 8 v. 4 ; xi. 21. 9 x. 10. THE REWARDS OF WELL-DOING 59 " Look at the generations of old, and see : who did ever put his trust in the Lord, and was ashamed ? " 1 " For every one that doeth righteous- ness there is a reward, and each man shall find according to his works." 2 Ben-Sira asserts the curious theory that in making our estimate of lives, the end is all that should be taken into account : it is what men finally come to before their extinction that matters, not the quality of their life as a whole. " The happiness of the day causeth the former evil to be forgotten, and the evil of the day causeth the happi- ness to be forgotten. For it is easy in the eyes of the Lord at the end to recompense a man according to his doing. A time of evil causeth pleasure to be forgotten, and it is the end of a man that pronounceth concerning him. Before his death call no man happy, for in his ending is a man made known." 8 " Ah, yes," you might say, " but if the good man dies like the bad man at last, where is any great difference between their lots?" "In the name which the good man leaves behind him," answers Ben-Sira, and I think you will never understand his position, to us so strange, if you do not grasp the extraordinary value he attaches to reputation. It may seem an absurdity to care what men say about you, when you are in the land where all things are forgotten, but it is an absurdity which in our own day men commit (and surely they are to be found ?) who without a belief in a future life yet are deter- mined by the desire for posthumous fame. Well, to Ben-Sira, it seems to make up for almost anything the good man may suffer, if, after he is gone, his name is still passed to and fro when men assemble 1 ii. 10. 2 xvi. 14. 3 xi. 25-28. 60 HELLENISM AND HEBREW WISDOM in the evenings about the gate, and good things are said of him. Here the great difference is marked between the righteous and the wicked. " All that is of dust returneth unto dust again ; even so the ungodly man passeth out of nothingness into nothingness. Man is a vain breath in respect of his body ; only the name of the pious shall not be cut off. Take thought for the name ; for that it is that re- maineth to thee, longer than thousands of goodly trea- sures. The good things of life are only for a tale of days ; but the good of the name is for days untold." 1 These two things then of supreme value a happy ending and a good name are attached in- dissolubly to the keeping of the commandments. The attachment is safeguarded by the personal action of the Author of the commandments. For the Author of the commandments is the Author of the world, and the Wisdom embodied in the com- mandments is the Wisdom diffused through the world. 2 Yes, the Hebrew sage feels vividly that this Law handed down among his people, is no mere code of a single small race, not even merely of the earth, but the incarnation, if one may say so, of a cosmic principle and akin to the stars. He feels Israel to be the centre of all things, the eventual heir of the ages. Over other nations the Creator set inferior powers of the unseen world to rule them, but Israel he chose for his own portion. 8 He employs that wonderful figure of the Divine Wisdom personified, familiar in the schools of Wise Men, the primeval Wisdom of the universe. "I came forth from the mouth of the Most High, and covered the earth as a mist. I dwelt in high places, and my 1 xli. 10-13. 2 * 9- 8 xy ii' J 7* COSMIC WISDOM 6 1 throne was in the pillar of the cloud. Alone I com- passed the circuit of heaven, and walked in the depth of the abyss. In the waves of the sea, and in all the earth and in every people and nation I wrought, creating. With all these I sought rest, and in whose inheritance, said I, shall I lodge? Then the Creator of all things gave me a command- ment ; and he that created me made my tabernacle to rest, and said, Let thy tabernacle be in Jacob and thine inheritance in Israel." 1 This is indeed throwing down the challenge to the pretensions of any foreign culture ! Standing in this peculiar relation to the uni- verse, the Hebrew is kindled with a feeling almost of intimate affection in praising the works of God. The beauty of the natural world is seldom made, in itself and directly, an object of praise in ancient literature : I do not know whether it is anywhere else praised so rapturously and lovingly as in this book, which is in so large part a handbook of social propriety and pedestrian worldly wisdom. It would take too long to read you now the great hymn of praise in the 42nd and 43rd chapters, but notice, for instance, this bit of a winter landscape : "He causeth the snow to come down like things of feathers, and its descent is as the alighting of locusts. The dazzling whiteness thereof confoundeth the eyes, and the heart is moved at its falling. The hoar-frost also he sprinkleth abroad like salt, and maketh the pine-needles to sparkle as with jewels." ! There is something almost modern in the sudden definiteness of that last touch ; unhappily it was lost in the Greek version and therefore in our English Bibles. 1 xxiv. 3-8. * xliii. 17-19. 62 HELLENISM AND HEBREW WISDOM Ben-Sira passes easily from his ideal heights to the ordinary life of men. About the family he has a good deal to say which is interesting, and opens to our glance a Jewish interior. He has a high estimate of the value of family life. " Get thee a wife, there is nought more worth the getting, a help meet for thee and a pillar of support. Where no hedge is, the vineyard is laid waste, and where no wife is, there is no settlement or abiding." * On the other hand he is convinced that most women are bad, and holds up a dreadful picture of what mar- riage, without exceptional prudence and the favour of God, will probably turn out. " The badness of a woman changeth the aspect of her husband and maketh his face dark as a bear's. Among his friends sitteth the husband, and without motive he sighs. There is little badness like the badness of a woman ; let the portion of a sinner fall on her ! " z He warns husbands to keep an inventory in black and white of all household stores, and a careful account of all incomings and outgoings, so that they may have their wives under control. 8 In his advice as to the education of children, the rod, as in the book of Proverbs, holds a principal place. 4 The fre- quent castigation of their children is one of those things of which men are told not to be ashamed. 6 To smile or look familiarly at son or daughter is a fatal mistake. "Cocker thy child, and he shall make thee afraid ; play with him, and he will grieve thee. Laugh not with him, lest thou have sorrow with him; and thou shalt gnash thy teeth in the end." 6 The evil propensities of daughters he describes in 1 xxxvi. 24, 25. a xxv. 17-19. 8 xlii. 6, 7. 4 MX. 11-13. 6 xlii. 5. 6 xxx. 9, 10 ; vii. 24. BEN-SIRA AND THE FAMILY 63 language of a repellent coarseness, which one hopes was not justified by the manners of Jerusalem, 1 and he advises that a daughter's apartment do not have a window upon the street or be in direct communica- tion with the general entrance. 2 With regard to that other essential element in the ancient family, the slave, Ben-Sira delivers himself thus : " Fodder, a stick and burdens for an ass ; bread and discipline and work for a household slave. Set thy slave to work, and thou shalt find rest ; leave his hands idle, and he will seek liberty. Yoke and thong will bow the neck ; and for an evil slave there are racks and tortures. Send him to labour, that he be not idle ; for idleness teacheth much mischief. Set him to work, as is fit for him ; and if he obey not, make his fetters heavy.' 1 8 The worthy citizen of Jerusalem is here quite in agreement with the standard pater- familias of old Rome ; Cato the Elder was noted for his fierce handling of his slaves. But Ben-Sira is careful to enjoin on the other side that a limit in torturing should be observed, and that, apart from deserved punishments, to care well for a slave is a master's interest. After all, he sensibly observes, you have spent money in buying him ; if you treat him too badly he will run away, and you may have a difficulty in finding him again. 4 But although the sage wears so austere a coun- tenance at home, he by no means abjures the plea- sures and festivities of life. He takes his enjoyment heartily, and would recognise " Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die " as a perfectly sound maxim. 5 1 xxvi. 12. 2 xlii. ii. 3 xxxiii. 24-28. 4 xxxiii. 29-31. 6 xiv. 11-17. "My son, if thou hast anything, do good to thyself, and, according to thy power, cherish thyself in sleekness." The grand- 64 HELLENISM AND HEBREW WISDOM Yet through all he holds himself prepared for reverses of fortune, wary of leaning too much upon circum- stances and especially wary of so far forgetting himself as to make God his enemy. " A wise man will fear in everything." l Ben-Sira dined out with pleasure where there was a good table, and he had a taste for wine. 2 He seems also to have had an especial delight in music, 3 and you could not annoy him more than by chattering while the musicians at a feast were performing. 4 But he warns us strongly against excess in food and drink, and describes with pathetic exactness the miseries of a night which follows too generous a meal. 5 Sometimes, of course, one's host practically compels one to eat too much ; in that case he recommends what was a common accompaniment of feasts in those days prompt recourse to an emetic. 6 He gives other hints for deportment at table. Do not, as soon as you sit down, crane out your neck, and exclaim : " What a lot there is on the table ! " When you see your host's eye travel to any morsel, beware of seizing it before him. Do not gulp down your food greedily. Do not stretch your hand across your neighbour. 7 But he has a special horror of loud laughter ; the wise man will at most be moved to a grave smile. 8 The sage, you see, is an eminently social being. He moves among men, sedate, deliberate, solid, his health secured by a judicious diet and his face shin- ing with a good conscience. Severe as he is within son has in his translation substituted for the second of these clauses the more edifying advice : " Bring offerings unto the Lord worthily," and so, of course, our English Bibles!* 1 xviii. 25-27 2 xiv. 10; xxxi. 22-24 ; xl. 20. 8 xl. 20, 21. 4 xxxii. 3-6. 8 xxxi. 20. 8 xxxi. 21. 7 xxxi. 1 2-1 8. 8 xxi. 20; xxvii. 13. SOCIAL VIRTUES 65 his house, he is ready to show a sedulous kindness wherever he meets outside it with want or trouble. To the poor man he will always return a courteous answer ; the orphan and widow will find him a firm protector. 1 Nobody need fear that ragged clothes will wrinkle his face with any movement of derision. 2 He has indeed had bitter experience of the ingrati- tude of men, but he will not allow that to check his hand in relieving distress. He will still "help a poor man for the commandment's sake." 8 You must re- member that the duty of almsgiving had come to take a peculiarly prominent place in the Jewish code of righteousness, so prominent that the very word for " righteousness " came in later Hebrew to be used in the special sense of almsgiving, just as has happened with our word "charity." Since therefore, as we saw, to keep the commandments is the best insur- ance for life, the giving of alms is an obvious measure of enlightened self-interest. "Whatever, Lord, we lend to Thee repaid a thousandfold will be, then gladly will we lend to Thee " is altogether in the spirit of Ben-Sira except that he might have thought the " thousandfold " pitching our expecta- tion somewhat too high. He is a very good friend, and a secret entrusted to him is locked in impenetrable silence. About no offence does he express himself with more abhor- rence than that of blabbing secrets. 4 His fidelity will stand all tests, and he is steadfast to his old loves. "New wine," he says, "a new friend; old wine, and thou wilt drink it." 5 " Change not a friend for money, neither a true brother for the 1 iv. i-io ; x. 22. 2 xi. 4 (Hebrew). 3 xxix. 9. 4 xxvii. 16-21. 5 ix. 10. E 66 HELLENISM AND HEBREW WISDOM gold of Ophir." 1 "Let thy acquaintance," he says elsewhere, "be many, and thy bosom-friend one of a thousand/' 2 Perhaps the Hebrew sage is by now present to your apprehension. Of many other types to be found in that Jewish society his book gives us glimpses more or less fugitive. Let me mention the man who tries to get the better of you by assuming an appearance of extreme affliction, "hang- ing down his head with mourning, bowing down his face, and making as if he were deaf of one ear " ; 3 the fool who offers shabby entertainment with great parade and circumstance, "opening his mouth like a crier," and then complains that men eat his victuals and abuse him behind his back ; 4 the stranger who is sponged upon by the residents in a place, and given the cold shoulder when they find it convenient to get rid of him ; 5 the merchant or small tradesman, too often almost forced by his business out of the straight line of rectitude ; 6 the seafaring men who have come home with wonderful stories of what they have seen on the high seas, of the great marine monsters. 7 In one chapter 8 we have the life of the scribe contrasted with the lower employments ; with that of the farm labourer, " who driveth out and bringeth back the oxen with songs, and whose converse can be only with young heifers," whose "heart is set upon turning his furrows, and who is occupied with fatted calves " ; 9 the craftsman, who makes objects of household use or does the fine 1 vii. 1 8. 2 vi. 6. Spoilt in the Greek translation. 3 xix. 26. 4 xx. 15-17. 6 xxix. 24-28. 6 xx vi. 29. 7 xliii. 24, 25. 8 xxxviii. 24-30. This translation supposes the reading nft^ (A. A. Bevan) for the flfxb of the text as printed by Peters. HUMAN ENVIRONMENT OF BEN-SIRA 67 work of gem-engraving ; the worker in metal, with the noise of the hammer ever in his ears and his eyes fixed upon the pattern after which he shapes his vessel ; the potter, whose manner of working is described in terms which make us regret that the Hebrew original of this passage is not among the recovered fragments. As among the old Persians, as among the Greeks and Komans of the good old times, agriculture is held in honour. 1 Ben-Sira has an especial regard for the physician, whom he bids us also respect. He defends the practice of medicine against the view, which in those days, as in ours, found supporters, that it implied want of faith in God. He points out that the skill of the physician is itself the use of a God-given faculty of observa- tion and that the properties of herbs also belong to them by the Divine order. 2 Perhaps we have in these references to medicine an isolated trace in Ben-Sira of Greek influence, since the medical science esteemed in the Nearer East had been, even before the Macedonian conquest, the medical science of the Greeks, and we may therefore conjecture that the Jewish physicians practised on Greek lines. It is now time to shut this curious old book. I do not know what you feel about Jeshua Ben-Sira. Perhaps there is something in his limited sober- going morality which displeases you. It is certainly not profound, and yet he impresses me as a worthy and honourable man. At any rate his atmosphere is clean to breathe. In passing to his environment from the heavy atmosphere of Joseph and Hyrcanus, charged with self-gratulation, flunkeyism and lust, I feel as if one were going into the open air. His 1 vii. 1 5. 2 xxxviii. 1-8. 68 HELLENISM AND HEBREW WISDOM outlook is wide and human ; he himself, as he tells us, has travelled in foreign lands and observed many kinds of men. There is in his book, one might per- haps say, a breath from the sea. And if there is a want of passion, of conflict, in this type of Judaism, if you must pronounce it too smoothly accom- modated to the world, wait a little and you will see a fierce enough trial cause another temper to be manifested in Israel, an anguish going down to the deep places of the soul, and evoking thence, not only a bitter cry, but, with the cry, a vaster, a more radiant hope. Ill JUDAS MACCABEUS AND HIS BRETHREN IN our first lecture we followed the history of Palestine to the time when it passed from the house of Ptolemy to the house of Seleucus. Of the history of the Jewish state itself we found little enough to say, but there is one figure belong- ing to this moment, which claims our attention, the figure of the high-priest Simeon, surnamed the Kighteous. And although even of Simeon there is not much of a definite kind recorded, we may believe that there was something in his personality which left a deep mark upon his contemporaries, for while so many who played a leading part in Jewish history between the days of Nehemiah and the Christian era were forgotten, Simeon the Righteous always lived on in the memory of the people. In the later Jewish traditions which we find embodied in the Mishnah and the Talmud, the names of Judas and of his brethren nowhere appear, 1 but of Simeon it is said that in nis days the red cord upon the head of the scapegoat turned white, a symbol of the national sins put away, that the lamps in the Temple never went out, and the flame on the altar burnt always clear and strong. 2 He became the typical embodi- ment of the high-priesthood in pre-Maccabaean days 1 They are alluded to anonymously as the "sons of Mattathiah" in the Megillath Taanith 1 1 a. 2 Drenbourg, Histoire et geog. de la Palestine, p. 48. 69 70 JUDAS AND HIS BRETHREN to the imagination of the later Jews. It is given as his characteristic maxim that the three pillars upon which the world rests are the Law, the holy ritual, and loving-kindness. But these documents date from a time long after Simeon, and we have more authentic notices of him than those in rabbinic tradition. We can find him portrayed in a contemporary writing, that book of Ben-Sira about which we spoke in our last lecture. If you will turn to the 5 head and the arm he had stretched out were cut oif and nailed up opposite the Temple against which he had blasphemed. But the battle of Adasa, with Demetrius on the throne, availed little. About a month later, it would seem, 1 Bacchides was at Jerusalem again with a serious force. He took the field against Judas, and compelled him to the alternative of a battle under unequal conditions or flight. Judas proudly chose the former, and at the end of the day lay dead upon the field of Eleasa. For the time, the Hasmonaean cause collapsed. Bacchides cleared Judaea of rebels, organised the country in the interest of the party of Alcimus and the Seleucid government, and secured its ap- proaches on all sides by a ring of military posts. As for the remaining sons of Hashmon, Jonathan, Simon and John, and those who clave to them, the wilderness once more offered them a refuge. It was seen that when the Seleucid power was wielded by a firm hand, it could make its authority effective in Judaea. The land was quiet under its system of garrisons. Alcimus did not enjoy his high-priest- hood long. He died, just before Bacchides left 1 The date is not quite certain ; some authorities think the interval was a year and a month. THE CHARACTER OF JUDAS 97 Judaea, of a paralytic stroke. His countrymen saw in this a judgment upon him, for attempting some alterations in the Temple, which involved a dis- turbance of the wall separating the inner court from the common ground outside. What estimate is history to make of Judas Maccabaeus ? Is he among the heroes or not ? Personally, I do not think that the character of our sources is such that history can say very much about him as a man. The only thing we can affirm with certainty is that he was an able and successful leader of irregular bands. That in itself implies a certain force of personality and a ready courage, but if these things alone are enough to constitute a hero in the high sense, we must make our list of heroes a very large one and include some strange figures. If we ask what his animating motives were, how far devotion to an ideal morally great, how far the ambition to use forces of national and religious enthusiasm for the aggrandisement of his house, I think the truth is that we really do not know. There is nothing, as far as I am aware, which would prove him to have been other than a man of spiritual greatness, if the savagery of his reprisals be once discounted in reference to his environment and time. But there are signs I do not like. I think it is ominous that the adherence of the Hasldim wavered in the latter part of his career. And it may be unfairly, but I think this first representative of the Hasmonsean house suffers in the light reflected upon him from the later history of the house. As early at any rate as the time of his brother Jonathan, his next successor, the policy of the house was thoroughly worldly, 98 JUDAS AND HIS BRETHREN and before long it had the more religious part of the nation set against it in open antagonism. Was Judas of quite another spirit ? He may have been. But was he ? We can see that if, under the persecutions of the Koman Empire, the early Christians had flown to arms, they might have won notable victories, but it would have been at how great spiritual cost! And it appears to me a question whether it was not at great spiritual cost that the Jewish people allowed itself to be launched by the sons of Hashmon upon a career of carnal strife. For the Jewish community could not be amenable to the same laws as ordinary nations ; it was, as we said, more like a church ; and the laws of a church's life were in that degree the true laws of its being. No Englishman can question the general right of a people to fight for its religion, for its independence ; but just, as according to the Mosaic law, Levi had to renounce many of the things possessed by his brethren because of his pre-eminent and sacred vocation, so perhaps the peculiar vocation of the Jewish community entailed inevitably the depriva- tion of certain rights belonging to men whose kingdoms are only kingdoms of this world. The absence of political interests which followed the loss of independence had given a larger place in the life of Israel to the sacred Law ; the anguish of persecution had driven thought and aspiration towards another world than this ; but development on these lines was impeded and confused by the clash of arms and terrestrial ambitions. And when we judge this struggle by its fruits, the same doubts are suggested. The war of the Greeks with the SPIRITUAL IMPORT OF THE REVOLT 99 Persians, the wars of independence in modern Europe, resulted in the enriching and ennobling of national life ; but what was the issue of the battling of Judas and his brethren ? The establishment of a dynasty by whose dominion the national life was poisoned and whose presence at the altar the religious denounced as a pollution. Perhaps this explains why the general conscience of Judaism so soon -allowed the memory of Judas and his brethren to fade, why it ultimately abstained from putting any book of Maccabees in its sacred canon. The Israelite has a history which at too many points rises to catch the radiance of heaven for him to make much account of such titles to fame as he would after all have in common with the Mahdists of the Sudan. IV THE HASMON^AN ASCENDANCY WE have seen how the trial of strength between the Jewish insurgents and the Seleucid government ended, when an active king was on the throne, in the death of Judas, the scattering of his adherents in the wilderness, and the reduction of Judaea under a strong military occupation. We have now to trace the stages by which from this apparent destruction the Hasmonsean house climbed once more to power, and to a power far higher than any which had been within reach in the days of Judas Maccabseus. But the conditions of their rise were in this epoch quite different from before. When Judas led them, they confronted a single central government, and won what they won by the sword from the royal forces. But from now the Seleucid house was with rare intervals represented by rival claimants, and the gains of the Jews were conces- sions from one or other of the kings, whose quarrels the astute Hasmonaean politicians knew how to turn to their own advantage. At the death of Judas, three of the original Five Brethren were left Jonathan, Simon, and John ; and John soon after came to his end in the obscure warfare which went on in the wilderness between the Hasmonsean bands and other marauders. The first step in their recovery was their being allowed to return to Judaea. This took place in 158, while JONATHAN RETU&MS " 101 Demetrius was still on the throne. We do not know enough of the circumstances of the time to explain how the government of Demetrius consented to such a weakening of its position. Jerusalem itself continued in the possession of the friends of the government, and the garrisons continued to hold the chain of forts, but Jonathan was allowed to establish his headquarters at Michmas and become the real ruler of the Judsean countryside. Then came the first split in the Seleucid kingdom which gave the Jews their opportunity. About 152 a young man who professed to be the son of Anti- ochus Epiphanes and called himself Alexander set up as a rival king on the coast of Palestine at Ptolemais. He was almost certainly an impostor and was otherwise known by the Syrian name of Balas. But he was supported by the other kings of the East, by the king of Pergamos, the king of Cappadocia, and Ptolemy Philometor. The effect was conspicuous in Judaea. In the first place, Demetrius for the greater conflict was obliged to draw in his forces, and many of the forts which coerced Judsea were evacuated. From others the garrisons fled. Demetrius could no longer hold Judaea against the Hasmonaeans, already grown a power in the land. His only chance was to enlist them upon his side. He therefore allowed them to make the next step in their upward progress. He allowed them to re-enter Jerusalem, and he author- ised Jonathan to maintain a military force. Only the citadel the akra, as it was called in Greek still remained in possession of the royal garrison. Jonathan used these concessions to the full. He set about repairing the fortifications of the city. . 102 THE HASMON^EAN ASCENDANCY He erected a fort for his own men to contain and neutralise the akra. But Jonathan's position as chief of the Jewish state was not assured, unless he held that office with which for the last 300 years the presidency of the state had been connected. The Hasmonsean family had resolved to possess itself of the high-priesthood. This next step upward rapidly followed on the last Alexander Balas, reigning in Ptolemais, was ready to outbid Demetrius by creating Jonathan high- priest. He further admitted him to one of those orders which, something like our orders of the Garter and the Bath, made up part of the system of a Hellenistic court, and sent him the purple robe and wreath of gold which distinguished its members. At the Feast of Tabernacles in October 152 1 Jonathan the Hasmonsean first appeared before his people in the sacred vestments of the high-priest high-priest " by the grace of Balas," as the German writer Wellhausen calls him, of Balas, perhaps the one altogether contemptible person of those who occupied the Seleucid throne. Two years later (150) Alexander Balas with the support of the kings of Pergamos and Egypt finally defeated and killed the lawful king Demetrius. Under his reign the relations between Jonathan and the court continued smooth. When Alexander married the daughter of King Ptolemy at Ptolemais, Jonathan, our Jewish account says, was among the most honoured guests. The defeated party among the Jews, those who had held by the Seleucid government in former days against the house of Hashmon, made a last desperate attempt to win 1 According to another view 1 53. JONATHAN AND ALEXANDER BALAS 103 over the new king. But Alexander would not listen to them and raised Jonathan to a higher order, that of the " First Friends," as it was called. Besides the authority which he possessed as high- priest, Jonathan was now given office under the Seleucid government, the office of governor of Judsea in the king's name. There still remained one con- spicuous relic of the old state of things, one galling reminder of the Gentile supremacy the garrison in the akra; Jonathan had still to pay tribute in various forms to the king; but for the time, the Hasmonsean house had good reason to rest satisfied with what it had attained. Balas gave Jonathan a practically free hand in Judsea, and thereby removed the causes of friction ; it was also to his interest to have Judaea held by a loyal supporter, while dangers loomed upon him from outside. There was almost always, in these days, as I said, the rival candidate somewhere. Now it was a younger Demetrius, the son of the Demetrius whom Alexander Balas had overthrown. His father had sent him and his younger brother Antiochus, of whom we shall hear more presently, into Asia Minor before he fell. In 148-147 Demetrius II. set foot in "the land of his fathers." He was a mere lad, at most fourteen, and the real directors of the invasion were certain Cretan adventurers, the captains of the mercenary forces which brought him. The presence of the rightful king at once set his partisans and those of Balas fighting throughout Syria. Apol- lonius, the governor of Ccele-Syria, that is, Pales- tine, declared for Demetrius, and so did the Philistine cities. Jonathan, acting as an adherent of Balas, 104 THE HASMON^EAN ASCENDANCY took the field against them. There was a battle near Azotus (Ashdod), in which the Jews were com- pletely victorious. The defeated army fled into Azotus and crowded for protection into the temple of Dagon. But Jonathan entered after them and burnt the temple over the heads of the living mass. Soon the smoke was going up, not from Azotus only, but from the neighbouring villages of the plain. Only Ascalon saved itself by timely subservience. Of course, Jonathan's stroke was an important ser- vice to the cause of Balas. He was rewarded by being promoted to the highest order of all, that of the Kinsmen, and the town of Ekron was assigned as a private possession to him and his heirs for ever. But a local success did not save the cause of Alexander Balas. Ptolemy Philometor struck in with a superior force. At first, he made as if he would support Balas, who had all through been to some extent his creature. Then he changed about and put Demetrius upon the throne. In 145 Alex- ander Balas made an attempt to recover the kingdom, but he was routed near Antioch and murdered by his own escort as he fled eastwards. Ptolemy how- ever was himself so badly wounded in the battle that he died a few days afterwards. This left the Cretans, whose tool Demetrius was, in possession of Syria. During these troubled times, Jonathan thought it a good opportunity to try to drive the garrison out of the akra. Of course, as soon as Demetrius II. was acknowledged as king, there was a prospect of Jonathan's being called to account. But he under- stood how to make it worth the new government's JONATHAN SERVES DEMETRIUS II. 105 while to let him alone. His diplomacy even suc- ceeded in bringing him a step nearer to the position of an independent prince, which was the next mark which the Hasmonaean house had in view. For the sake of a lump sum paid down of 300 talents the government of Demetrius II. consented to forego all future claims for tribute. Demetrius also enlarged the Judaean territory on the north by transferring to it some of the district of Samaria. Jonathan was admitted to an honorary order in the new court not indeed that of Kinsman to which Balas had ultimately raised him, but to that of the First Friends. Perhaps, on his part he agreed to leave the garrison alone. It was not long before the misgovernment and oppression of the Cretan adventurers drove the cities of Syria to revolt. At Antioch the crowd attacked the palace, and the king's men set the city on fire. The crowd were panic-stricken and every one tried to regain his home and save his family and goods before the fire reached them. The narrow streets were jammed with a mass of struggling terrified people. This gave the king's men their chance ; they leapt along from roof to roof and shot down into the thick of the crowd below. One is sorry to know that among those who at that awful moment were the instruments of tyranny was the Jewish con- tingent sent by Jonathan to the king. The author of i Maccabees deliberately tries to make us believe that they massacred 100,000 persons in Antioch, and returned laden with plunder. What glory could the Jews claim for their own struggle for independence under Judas and his brethren, when they were so ready to sell themselves to the oppressors of another io6 THE HASMONJEAN ASCENDANCY people and crush those who were rising against in- tolerable wrong ? No, I think it is to another scene that we must look, if we would see the qualities of the Jews shine forth in their true glory to the day before the nation was infuriated by the call of the sons of Hashmon to that scene in the wilderness when a little band of the faithful suffered themselves to be slaughtered without striking a blow that they might not transgress the law of their God, but might die in their simplicity. The inevitable rival claimant soon appeared. Within a few months of the battle which made Demetrius II. sole king, an infant son of Alex- ander Balas, known as Antiochus Dionysus, had been proclaimed in Apamea, one of the great towns of Syria to the south of Antioch (still in 145). The leader of this faction was a general of high standing called Tryphon. The Jews soon joined the son of their old friend Alexander Balas. They complained that although they had helped Demetrius to massacre the Antiochenes he had not removed the garrison from the akra. Tryphon, of course, welcomed their adherence, and Jonathan was made one of the Kins- men of the young Antiochus as he had been of the father. Simon was given the post of governor of Palestine. In virtue of these dispositions, the two Hasmonaean brothers now had under their command not only their national levies, but the forces of the Palestinian province. They engaged in a series of military operations, not any longer as chiefs fighting on their own account, but as the officers of King Antiochus, waging war against the party of Deme- trius. Gaza held by Demetrius ; Jonathan besieged and took it. His operations extended as far as JONATHAN SEIZED BY TRYPHON 107 Damascus. We hear in i Mace. xi. and xii. of collisions between Jonathan and the generals of Demetrius in Galilee. But, of course, all the time the Hasmonaean brothers were using their power as the generals of Antiochus to advance the interests of the Jewish state. It was natural that in the course of warfare they should, as generals of Antiochus, put garrisons in places which had been won from Demetrius or were in danger of being captured by his partisans. As chiefs of the Jews, they took care, wherever it was convenient, that these garrisons should be Jewish ones. In this way Beth-sur, Adida and Joppa became practically Jewish strongholds. Jona- than also engaged, as if an independent prince, in negotiations with the great rising power of the West, Eome. 1 Tryphon knew quite well that Jonathan was playing a double game. He thought that he had derived all the good that was possible from his use as an instrument, and that it was time to get rid of him. Accordingly, when Jonathan was consorting with him on friendly terms in Ptolemais, he suddenly made him a prisoner. The news caused absolute panic at Jerusalem. But Simon rose to the occasion and caused the people to feel that they had yet a leader left. So instead of giving way to despair, the Jews pushed forward the defences of Jerusalem and took strong action at Joppa. It was already held by a Jewish garrison; now the whole population was turned out neck and crop, and replaced by Jewish families. Observe that the old policy of Judas, the 1 Whether Judas had begun diplomatic relations with Rome is a vexed question. Schiirer still holds the account of the mission sent by him authentic. Jonathan's negotiations are also questioned. io8 THE HASMON^EAN ASCENDANCY policy of concentration, which brought in the scat- tered Jewish colonies to Judaea, has now given place to a policy of expansion, which pushes new settle- ments of Jews beyond the limits of Judaea. And it is significant that the place seized thus early is the gate which allows direct communication between Jerusalem and the lands overseas. Tryphon marched round Judaea, but the prospects did not seem favourable for invasion. When he reached the country beyond Jordan, he put Jonathan to death. Simon buried his brother at Modin, the city of his fathers, and as the last survivor of the Five Brethren, took up the inheritance. Soon after this (143-142) Tryphon murdered the boy-king Antiochus Dionysus and assumed the diadem him- self, although not of the Seleucid family. His action snapped the last link which bound the Jews to his cause. Simon made overtures to Demetrius, whose court was ready to grant further concessions. These included complete immunity from all dues which had marked the Seleucid supremacy. 1 In the following year (142-141) the garrison in the akra, decimated by famine, at last surrendered. On the 23rd of Ijjar (May) 141 the victorious nationalists entered "with praise and palm branches and with harps and with cymbals and with viols and with hymns and with songs." 2 Thus, while the Seleucid kingdom fell to pieces, the Jewish state looked round and found itself free. 1 It has been suggested that by the former grant of Demetrius in 152 "all taxes were abolished except the golden crown to be paid upon the investiture of a new high priest," and that this also was now re- mitted. Reinach, " Jewish Going " (Engl. trans, by Mary Hill : Lawrence and Bullen, 1903, p. 7). 2 i Mace. xiii. 51. THE LIBERATION OF JERUSALEM 109 "The yoke of the heathen was taken away from Israel." Jerusalem began a new era, and documents were dated "In the year i, Simon being High-priest and General and Ruler of the Jews." And mean- while the policy of expansion was followed up, where occasion offered. Even before the akra fell, the Jews had taken Gazara (Gezer) which commanded the road between Jerusalem and Joppa. And here too, as at Joppa, the heathen population was expelled and replaced by Jews. Twenty years from the time that Judas fell at Eleasa, the Hasmonaean house has climbed to this height. It has eliminated all com- petitors in the Jewish state ; it has got free from foreign control. But it is still represented by one of the Five Brethren, and it might be a question whether its power did not rest upon their individual prestige, whether the family would retain it when the last of them was gone. This further point was secured in 141. In the September of that year an assembly of the Jewish people at Jerusalem ratified the high-priesthood which the Hasmonseans had hitherto held by the nomination of Gentile kings. Simon was to be Chief of the people and High-priest "for ever, until there should arise a prophet worthy of credence." 1 The people felt it necessary to add that, because the old line of high-priests had been of Divine appointment, and now, they would say, it is only because the Divine Will has not declared itself that they take upon themselves to establish another leader, provisionally. But, till a new revela- tion, Simon is to be " High-priest for ever," that is, his office is to be perpetuated in his sons. The Jews however were soon to find out that 1 i Mace. xiv. 41. no THE HASMON^EAN ASCENDANCY there was force left in the house of Seleucus still. In 140 Demetrius led out an expedition to recover the provinces conquered by the new power of the East, the Parthians, who already threatened, and had perhaps even overrun, Babylonia. But Demetrius himself fell into their hands, and the Parthian king Mithridates I. kept him a close prisoner. The younger brother of Demetrius, Antiochus VI., nicknamed Sidetes, landed in 138 in Syria *to take his place, and carry on the war against Tryphon. There is some reason to believe that the advent of Antiochus Sidetes brought the acquisition of another right to the Jews the right of coining their own silver money. Coins have been found which some of the chief authorities in this field believe to have been struck at Jerusalem under Simon. The larger ones have on one side " Shekel of Israel " and on the other side " Jerusalem the Holy." l But Antiochus had not been long in the kingdom Ibefore there were alarming signs of his intentions with regard to the Jews. Antiochus Sidetes was a very different character from his incapable brother, and had inherited the energy and ability of his father, the first Demetrius. It was the unauthorised aggressions of the Jews outside their own borders, the seizure of Joppa and Gazara, about which he addressed representa- tions to Simon. The king's subjects had been harried in other quarters too and he required that they should receive compensation. He was willing to allow the Jews to retain possession of Joppa and Gazara, but they must give a quid pro quo; he 1 See Keinach, "Jewish Coins," p. 10 /. END OF SIMON in named 500 talents. He also demanded the same sum as indemnity for their depredations. It was, as far as we can judge, a moderate and rational demand. Simon tried to bargain. He offered 100 talents. Antiochus thought the best answer was to order the governor of the Philistine coast to move a force into Judsea. The governor's attempt to do so was not fortunate. Simon was now too old to take the field, but his sons Judas and John commanded the Jewish army and drove the governor back into the plain. Antiochus could not for the time take further measures. He had still to recover a great part of the kingdom from Tryphon. When Tryphon had been crushed and the kingdom got in hand, Antiochus Sidetes resumed his measures for bringing back the Jewish state to allegiance. But when he did so, Simon was no longer there. His end was tragic. There were other ambitious men among the Jews beside the sons of Hashmon ; one of these was Ptolemy the son of Abub, who had married Simon's daughter. Ptolemy formed the design of seizing the first place. In the February of 135 he invited his old father-in-law to a carousal in his fortress of Dok, and then fell upon him while he was heavy with wine. But Ptolemy's plan was foiled by the promptitude of John the son of Simon, who at the time of the murder was in Gazara. Before Ptolemy could possess himself of Jerusalem, John was already there installed in the room of his father. In the very first year of his high-priesthood John had to sustain the attack of the restored Seleucid power. Once more it was made plain that the Seleucid 1 1 2 THE HASMOSLEAN ASCENDANCY power when united was more than a match for the Hasmonaean. Antiochus drove in the Jewish forces and laid siege to Jerusalem. John held out for at least a year ; then he was obliged by the famine in the city to ask for terms. Before April I34 1 Jerusalem capitulated. In spite of the advice of his courtiers, who wanted him to revert to the policy of Antiochus Epiphanes, Antiochus Sidetes used his victory with moderation. He neither re-imposed tribute nor interfered in the internal affairs of Judaea. But he insisted on the disarmament of the people, the dismantling of Jerusalem, the payment of rent for Joppa and Gazara, and 500 talents indemnity. His moderation, and politic honours which he showed to the Temple, did as a matter of fact surprise the Jews. They named him Antiochus the Pious. Presently when he led his armies east- wards against the Parthians rn 130, it included a Jewish contingent led by the high-priest John in person. It is impossible to say how long the Jews would have acquiesced in their new subordination, if Antiochus Sidetes had continued to reign. But he perished in the Eastern war in 129, and his brother Demetrius, whom the Parthians had released in order to create embarrassments for Antiochus, came back to Syria. With Demetrius there also came back chaos and a tangle of wars between rival kings. Some of these might from time to time annoy the Jews, but with the death of Antiochus Sidetes all possibility of a Seleucid re-conquering Judaea vanished for ever. From now for sixty-five years the Jewish state was completely independent, as 1 Keinach, "Jewish Coins," p. 16 /. CONQUESTS OF JOHN HYRCANUS 113 free as it had been in the days of the old kingdom of Judah. Between the period of Greek supremacy and the period of Roman supremacy came sixty-five years of freedom. John the high-priest came back safe from the East, and resumed his functions at Jerusalem. He bore beside his Hebrew name of Johanan or John the surname of Hyrcanus. John Hyrcanus used his recovered independence to strengthen and enlarge his principality. North, south and west the Jewish state pushed forward its frontiers. In the north John laid the Hasmonsean yoke upon the hated kinsmen of the Jews, the Samaritans. He took their city of Shechem and destroyed the rival temple on Mount Gerizim. In the east, his armies advanced beyond Jordan and took the old Moabite town of Medeba. In the south he conquered the Edomites, so that his principality had now more than the extent of the old Davidic kingdom after its separation from Northern Israel. But in the case of the Edomites he adopted a policy which was of the most momentous consequence. He not only conquered them ; he compelled them to conform to the Jewish law, to become Jews. He extended the limits, that is, not only of his dominion, but of the congregation of Israel. The descendants of these Edomites were, in the Jewish sense " fellow- citizens with the holy people, and of the household of God," although, as was natural, the Jews of purer blood claimed a higher social prestige and were apt to speak of their Edomite brethren contemptuously as " half Jews." The last conquest of John Hyrcanus brought him into conflict with one of those members of the H ii4 THE HASMONJ3AN ASCENDANCY Seleucid house who were fighting over what remained of the ancestral dominion. Hyrcanus laid siege to Samaria. Let me remind you that Samaria was not a city of the Samaritans, whom Hyrcanus had already conquered. The Samaritans lived in the territory of Samaria, but their chief town was Shechem ; Samaria itself was a heathen city, a Macedonian colony. When he had seen the investment of the city completed, Hyrcanus left his sons Antigonus and Aristobulus to prosecute the siege. Samaria sent a cry for help to Antiochus, nicknamed Cyzicenus, who was at that time in possession of part of Syria. Antiochus came up and attacked the besieging army of the Jews, but Antigonus and Aristobulus saved the honour of their house by defeating him signally. This was one of those cases, of which history knows a definite number, where a great event is alleged to have been immediately known at a distance by those interested in it ; the high-priest, it is said, was officiating in the Temple, when he suddenly was aware of a voice which announced that his sons had won a victory over Antiochus. Hostilities continued for a while between Antiochus or his generals and the Jews, with perhaps greater loss to the Jews than Josephus allows. But they did not make Antigonus and Aristobulus relax their grip upon Samaria. After a year's siege it fell, and the Jews did all they could to obliterate every trace of the city which they hated both from old memories of rivalry and for its recent character as a seat of the Gentiles. They turned the watercourses over its site. About the same time they got possession of another important Hellenistic ARISTOBULUS KING 115 city of central Palestine, Scythopolis, the old Beth- shan (about 108 B.C.). Such military and conquering activity as all these events show us is not what we naturally associate with the idea of a Jewish high-priest. And in fact the Hasmonseans were taking on more and more the same aspect as the other kings and princes of the world. John Hyrcanus, we are told, was the first of his line to surround himself with a guard of foreign mercenaries, and he is said to have rifled the tomb of David to get the money wherewith to pay them. His son Aristobulus, who succeeded him in 104, took the final step of assuming the name of King. In Jerusalem indeed and to the Jews themselves he was, if we may judge by his coins, still known by his Hebrew name of Judas and his title of high-priest, but to foreigners he showed himself in state as Aristobulus, the King of the Jews. Not only in its outward trappings, but in its inner character, the court of King Aristobulus showed its likeness to those of the other potentates. Here too family feuds and bloodshed became the order of the day. Aristobulus caused his mother to die of starvation in prison, and he imprisoned all his brothers, except Antigonus, whom he loved. But this exemption only gave room for Antigonus to incur suspicion, and his end was to be despatched by the swords of the king's body-guard. Even in his short reign Judas Aristobulus had time to add another conquest to those of his father. He carried the Jewish frontier farther north by subduing part of what was known as Galilee of the Gentiles, the Region of the Gentiles, the part inhabited by the Iturseans. These, like the Edomites, were forced to embrace Judaism, n6 THE HASMONJ1AN ASCENDANCY and Aristobulus was thus the creator of that Galilee which we know in our gospels a region whose population is Jewish in belief and practice, but Gentile to a large degree in descent. You re- member that the speech of the Galileans was noted as provincial at Jerusalem, and many of our Lord's apostles, for all we know, may have been of Itursean extraction. This part of the work of the Hasmonsean dynasty, preparing as it did the field for Christ, was perhaps, of all that they did in the world, the thing of most durable consequence for the history of mankind. Aristobulus only reigned for a year and was then succeeded by one of the brothers whom he had imprisoned (103 B.C.). This brother was called Jonathan, but he is generally known by the shortened form of the name, Jannai, Grecised as Jannaeus, in addition to which he bore the genuine Greek name of Alexander. The reign of Alexander Jannseus marks the culminating period of the Hasmonsean dynasty, and we may pause at its threshold to ask what these last exciting sixty years meant for the inner life of the Jewish people. I do not know whether you, in listening to this lecture, have been as conscious as I in speaking, how little we have really touched the life of the people, in tracing the successive steps by which one family climbed to power and kingship. Little more than a series of four individuals Jonathan, Simon, Hyrcanus, Aristobulus has passed before your eyes ; we have spoken of their ambitions and their exploits ; but they are not the Jewish people. Unfortunately, when we try to look outside the courts and camps of kings, the ancient historians and other documents THE RELIGIOUS AND THE DYNASTY 117 give us very poor light, but we have to turn their fitful glimmer to the best use we can. You will remember that we heard of a set of people in the days of Antiochus Epiphanes called the Hasldim, the godly ones, who were drawn together by their zeal for the Law and opposition to all Hellenistic innovations. We saw that when the sons of Hashmon began the fight for religion the Hasldim gave them their support, but that later on, when Judas had gone on to fight for the ends of national and dynastic ambition, there were signs of a coldness toward the Hasmonsean house on the part of the Hasidlm. After that we lose sight of them. But they represent a tendency in the com- munity which under one name or another always went on the tendency to concentrate all interest and energy upon the Law, the pursuit of righteous- ness, and to regard political and military ambitions with more or less of indifference. To this frame of mind the rise of the Hasmonsean family would hardly present itself a national glory ; it would be rather inclined to scrutinise their title to the high-priest- hood and the way they exercised the sacred office. But we cannot doubt that the rise of a native dynasty stirred the great mass of the people with pride and indefinite hopes. And we should not have been able to mark off sharply those governed by one tendency and those governed by the other ; in most men both would have blended in varying proportions. Those set upon worldly triumphs would in most cases have told themselves that their swords were bringing new glory and dominion to the Law ; and many of those most earnestly religious would have seen the goodness of God in the grow- n8 THE HASMON^EAN ASCENDANCY ing strength of the Jewish state under its priestly chiefs. This last way of viewing things is reflected for us in a document which belongs to a time of military successes, one of those writings which have heen combined to make up the book of Enoch as we now have it. Its form shows the influence of the book of Daniel in creating a new type of literature, the Apocalypse. According to a method characteristic of apocalyptic writings, the developments of history are represented by a procession of symbolical animals. Israel is a race of white sheep, the nations who oppress them are lions, boars, eagles, and so on. It is conceived that when God delivered up His people to subjection to the Gentiles, He put them under the charge of a number of angels, who were to watch over them in turn, one by one, and see that no more destruction was done upon them by the Gentiles than the exact amount prescribed by God. These angels are typified as seventy shepherds, and their successive watches cover the whole period from the Babylonian captivity to the final redemption. The excessive sufferings of Israel are accounted for by the fact that the shepherd-angels have been un- faithful to their trust and allowed more destruction to take place than was ordained a sin for which they will one day be cast into the lake of fire. In reviewing that part of the history which we have traversed in these lectures, the writer mentions the restoration of the Temple after the Exile, and it is noteworthy that to the view of the religious circle which he represents the succeeding epoch was marked by a spiritual blindness in the people and an imperfection in the holy ritual. The bread offered VISION OF THE SEVENTY SHEPHERDS 119 in the second Temple " was polluted and not pure. And besides all this the eyes of these sheep were blinded so that they saw not." l Later on, under the Greek supremacy is formed the party of the Hasldim and an attempt is made at revival. " Behold, lambs were born by those white sheep and they began to open their eyes and to see, and to cry to the sheep. But the sheep did not cry to them and did not hear what they said to them, but were exceedingly deaf, and their eyes were exceedingly and forcibly blinded." 2 Then came the brunt of persecution under Antiochus Epiphanes and the murder of Oniah. " The ravens," i.e., the Seleucid government, "flew upon those lambs and took one of those lambs, and dashed the sheep in pieces and devoured them." After this the faithful Jews began armed resistance, but were at first overpowered by the royal forces. " Horns grew upon those lambs, and the ravens cast down their horns." At the call of the Hasmonsean leader, the people were at last nerved with a great enthus- iasm ; the fatal apathy which had allowed the encroachments of Hellenism came to an end ; the nation rallied around its chief. " And I saw till a great horn of one of those sheep branched forth, and their eyes were opened. And it looked at them and their eyes opened, and it cried to the sheep, and the rams saw it and all ran to it. ... And those ravens fought and battled with it and sought to destroy his horn, but they had no power over it." The struggle is still going on between the sheep with the great horn and a gathering volume of enemies, Gentiles and Hellenising Jews, "eagles and vultures and ravens and kites and all the sheep 1 Enoch Ixxxix. 73, 74. a Enoch xc. 6, 7. 120 THE HASMON^EAN ASCENDANCY of the field " (i.e., wild sheep), and the writer looks for it to be ended only by the appearance of God Him- self for judgment. Then the earth will engulf all the enemies of Israel, and the judgment-throne will be set up in " the pleasant land " and the Lord of the sheep will sit upon it to judge the seventy un- faithful shepherds. The end of the vision is con- cerned with the final beatitude of Israel. I think Professor Charles has made out a good case for believing this writing to belong to the early days of the wars of independence and for seeing in the horned sheep Judas Maccabseus himself. At any rate it belongs to a time when a writer who evidently represents the standpoint of the Hasldim can see a God-given saviour in the Hasmonaean chief. In appearance the victory of the Hasmonseans was a victory of the party of righteousness over the party of worldliness. But as in the case of so many other apparent victories, when we look closer we see that it was really a compromise. No doubt, all those in the ranks of the Jerusalem aristocracy who had involved themselves deeply in Hellenism were exterminated by the victorious Hasmonseans. But there remained a number of rich priestly families whose Judaism was sufficiently correct to ensure them their place in the purified community, but for whom it was impossible to maintain long the high religious tension which characterised the Hasldim. The thoughts of such men, even if temporarily exalted in the days of crisis, would soon come to earth again and move on the old levels. The spirit which had been embodied in the sons of Tobiah would soon find new entrance into the circles of the rich and noble. On the THE PHARISEES 121 other hand, it was no longer possible for them to go the lengths of Jason and Menelaus. This, at any rate, the religious party had secured, that there was to be no overt breach with the Law, no visible sign of idolatry, no tampering with the sacred ritual. The spirit that had been the spirit of the Hellenisers was not exorcised, but it was kept within bounds. The two spirits which worked in the body of Judaism found expression in the two parties whose names first became current, we are told, under the early Hasmonsean chiefs the parties of the Phari- sees and the Sadducees. The Pharisees seem to be just the old Hasldlm under a new designation, Ph'rishayyd, " those who separate themselves.' They were those whose preoccupation was to realise in the fullest way the ideal of legal purity, absolute separation from everything that defiled. But upon what did the distinction between clean and unclean rest? Not on any ascertainable quality in things themselves, but on the prescriptions of the Law. If therefore we set out to avoid every contact with what is unclean, we must above all things observe in the strictest possible way every direction of the Law. But the moment we try to do so, we are confronted in our every-day life with a thousand doubtful questions : no code can give more than general rules, which need continual sharper defini- tion as they are applied to practice. The Law, for instance, can tell us to do no work and to carry no burden on the Sabbath day, but if we are to run no risk of transgressing we must know what exactly constitutes "work" and what consti- tutes a " burden." It is easy to laugh at the absurd pettiness of the questions with which the Pharisees 122 THE HASMON^EAN ASCENDANCY came in time to be occupied, whether one might eat an egg laid on the Sabbath, and so on ; but if you once set out in making conformity to a written code the guiding principle of your life, I should like to know where you are to stop short of such questions. After all, the problem of the egg was presented in daily life and had to be decided one way or the other. We may call the Pharisaic casuistry a reductio ad dbsurdum of their prin- ciple, if we will; but granting their principle, there seems no escape from the casuistry. But further, if a law is to be applied to life, and we are not to decide the doubtful questions by our own judgment, there must be some authority beside the law to fix its interpretation for us in reference to each case that occurs an authority that holds the position of a judge in English law. This the Pharisees found in the schools of " Scribes/' whose business it was to hand on, and to define by fresh decisions, the " tradition of the elders." Just as in the case of English Common Law, the verdicts of judges become part of the Law, so the Pharisee held that the decisions of a recognised teacher of the Law, which he gave, of course, not on his personal authority, but as the exponent of a tradi- tion, became, under certain conditions, legally binding upon him. There were scribes who were not Pharisees, and whose decisions the Phari- sees repudiated, but for the most part the scribes were themselves Pharisees, that is, they recognised as binding the same body of tradition as the Pharisaic party generally and made this the basis of their own pronouncements. To the Pharisee then the commands of the written Law HALAKAH AND AGGADAH 123 were supplemented, or rather, as he believed, defined, by an ever-growing body of oral tradition. This tradition was known as Hiilakah, that is "Walking," what we should express as "every-day practice/' and in the later Judaism, which was Pharisaism developed, we find the startling declar- ation : " It is a sorer offense to teach things contrary to the ordinances of the scribes, than to teach things contrary to the written Law." But the elaboration of the Halakah was not the only occupation of the scribe ; he had also to hand on the tradition which supplemented the written history by additional matter of a narrative kind or which defined belief as to the spiritual world. This kind of tradition was called Aggadah, "Teach- ing." We saw how the fiery trial through which the faithful passed under Antiochus Epiphanes caused the dark beyond death to be illuminated for them with new light, how it made the hope of the resurrection, of a world not like this world, where all the injustices of this present life should be redressed, a part of the heritage of Israel. But such hopes were not welcomed by all the Jewish people ; many, when life here, under native princes, once more became tolerable, were quite content, like their fathers, not to look beyond it. For instance, take the first book of the Maccabees, composed at any rate after the accession of John Hyrcanus. In contrast to 2 Maccabees, which lays stress on the future life, the author of i Maccabees in all his account of the persecution, of the motives which nerved Judas and his friends, never alludes to any hope in a world to come ; with him, it is still the good name, the memorial in Israel, which 124 THE HASMON^AN ASCENDANCY is paramount, as it was with Ben-Sira in pre-Macca- bsean days. 1 We could not, of course, argue from this that the writer repudiated the idea ; but if he held it, it had fallen into the background. It was in the Pharisaic Aggadah that these hopes were preserved. There was much in it of fancy, of mere visionary refuse, but it focussed for the thought of Israel the ideas of the future beyond and the Messianic kingdom, and was it not better that these should be handed on, in however fantastic a dress, than that the prospect should be bounded by the grave ? The great priestly families stood, as a class, aloof from the Pharisaic movement. Of the two alternative explanations of the name Sadducees, that which connects it with the Hebrew word for "righteous" (saddik) and that which connects it with the proper name Zadok (Sad6k, or according to one pronunciation Saddftk), it is the latter ex- planation which now has the balance of learned opinion on its side. The Sadducees were the party which took its tone from the great priestly families, the "sons of Zadok." They represented the other spirit in Israel and found this world so good a place to live in that they desired no other. They were antagonistic to the developments of Pharisaic piety both in the field of Halakah and in that of Agga- dah. They desired, of course, that the ritual and ceremonial law, so far as it was definitely laid down in the written Mosaic code, should be maintained. It was, after all, the basis of their own revenues. But they had not that ardour, that craving for righteous- ness, which could make the burden of the Pharisaic Halakah tolerable. They were bound to have their 1 See for instance i Mace. ii. 51, 64 ; vi. 44 ; ix. 10. THE SADDUCEES 125 traditions as to the way the Law should be carried out in practice, but they refused to make the authority of their scribes absolute, to submit them- selves blindly to their direction. They were equally averse from all the new lore of angels and spirits, of invisible worlds and resurrection, contained in the Pharisaic Aggadah ; in so far as they were true to their profession, they stood by the solid common- sense morality which had been inculcated upon their fathers by such teachers as Ben-Sira. It is sometimes said that the Sadducees were analogous to the modern rationalists. The comparison is not a happy one. All analogies between the ancient and the modern are liable to be misleading, but if I had to find an English parallel to the Sadducees, it would rather be those in the eighteenth century who adhered to the church of the fashionable classes, resenting any religious claim upon them outside the routine of conventional decencies, and bitterly opposed the fantastic " enthusiasm," as they called it, of the followers of Wesley. Sadduceism was the religion of the noble, the well-to-do ; the Pharisees were the party of the people. Adoption as an " associate " (haber) in the company of those who would take upon them in its fullest extent the yoke of the Law was open to the poorest. Of course, the people as a whole did not become Pharisees, but they regarded the Pharisees with immense reverence. The influence of the Pharisaic doctors was very great with the multitude. It was so great that we are told the Sadducean priests had in matters of ritual actually to conform to the Pharisaic rules from the pressure of public opinion. And it is because the opposi- 126 THE HASMON.EAN ASCENDANCY tion of Pharisees and Sadducees was to some extent that opposition of pious poor and hard-hearted rich which was of old standing in Israel (in the Psalms, you remember, "poor" and "pious" are almost synonymous) that in criminal justice the Pharisees were noted for being the more lenient. I think it will be apparent to you that as soon as the Hasmonaeans were established in the state as the dominant family among the priestly aristoc- racy, their natural affinities would be rather with the other families of the ruling class than with the religious enthusiasts by whose support they had risen to power. It was almost inevitable that their alienation from the Pharisees should become wider and wider, and their understanding with the Saddu- cees closer. Probably the Pharisaic party were offended by Jonathan's assumption of the high- priesthood, but there does not seem to have been any open antagonism during the first generation of Hasmonseans, the generation under whose leading the " godly ones " had waged war. It was not till John Hyrcanus had succeeded his father, that the Pharisees and the Hasmonsean house openly parted company. It was when some bold voice among the Pharisees spoke out at last before the Hasmonsean chief and demanded point blank that he should cease to usurp the high-priesthood, whether he continued to hold the political supre- macy or not, that John Hyrcanus became a declared enemy of the Pharisees and even tried to put down their distinctive practices by force. After this we are prepared to find that the great-nephew of Judas Maccabseus, King Aristo- bulus, the murderer of his mother and brother, was JAN1SLEUS ALEXANDER 127 noted as a friend of the Greeks. The Gentile writers of the time, from whom Strabo'e information was ultimately derived, spoke well of him. The crimes of the palace did not show so much in the eyes of the world, as to counteract the impression of enlightened civility, of the absence of any narrow Jewish fanaticism, in the Hasmonaean king. Aristobulus, as we saw, was succeeded by his brother Jannaeus Alexander. Now, while the Seleucid and Ptolemaic dynasties were in the con- vulsions of death, while the Roman legions were still unknown to Syria, the Jewish kingdom for a space had its turn as the dominant power in Pales- tine. From the time of his accession to the time of his death King Alexander was a fighter and a conqueror. He belonged to the type of barbaric chieftain, fierce and sensual, whose life alternated between bloody raids and the gross indulgence of his palace. Sometimes his plans were impeded by one or other of the representatives of the houses of Seleucus or Ptolemy appearing upon the scene with an army, as in the vicissitudes of their own unending broils they had an opportunity of doing so. But such interferences were only momentary checks. By the end of his reign of twenty-seven years he had pushed out the frontiers of his king- dom on all sides. His power extended north as far as the Lake of Merom, on the west over the Philistine coast from Carmel to the Egyptian fron- tier, on the east over Bashan and Gilead beyond Jordan. These regions, as we saw, were covered with cities of Greek culture. But to Greek culture King Jannseus was no friend ; as far as destruction went, he was a good Jew. The policy of com- 128 THE HASMON^EAN ASCENDANCY pelling the conquered, if possible, to embrace Judaism was still followed. Under the blast of the Jewish conquests, civilisation in Palestine withered away. Where there had been prosperous cities were heaps of ruins. Fields went back to brushwood, and roaming bands of marauders had free course in the land. Such a state of things marked the zenith of the Hasmonsean power. King Jannaeus Alexander, we must not forget, was also the High-priest of the Lord. But if the relations between Hyrcanus and the Pharisees had been bad, things were far worse under Jannaous. The Pharisees had the people with them, and one day it was the Feast of Tabernacles when the high -priest was officiating in the Temple, the people fell to pelting him with the lemons which they carried by the custom of the feast. Jannaeus set his mercenaries wild men from the hills of Asia Minor upon them, and there was some blood spilt in Jerusalem. The people were henceforward only quiet, so long as they thought the king's hand strong enough to hold them down. Presently, their chance came. Jannaeus had become involved in a war with the King of the Nabataeans ; for the Nabatsean power also had grown great at this epoch of confusion, and was the one power which could seriously challenge the Jewish supremacy in Pales- tine. Jannaeus met with a bad reverse somewhere beyond Jordan, and when he reappeared at Jerusalem with only the shadow of his army, the Jews rose. Then came an unnatural war in which the great- nephew of Judas Maccabseus fought on one side, with an army consisting in part of Greek troops, and the Jewish people on the other. To complete the JANN^EUS CRUSHES THE PHARISEES 129 strangeness of the situation the Jewish people in their extremity appealed to a successor of Antiochus Epiphanes a Seleucid prince who reigned as King Demetrius III. Eukairos in Damascus. Demetrius came to the help of the Jews against their king, and in a battle near Shechem Jannseus was crushingly defeated. After this, however, the pros- pect of having a Seleucid once more over them made numbers of the Jews desert the Pharisaic cause for that of Jannseus, and Demetrius, who was not in a position to carry on the war without them, drew back again to Damascus. Still the more ardent spirits did not give in. But their leaders were driven by Jannseus into some fortress and captured. And now came the crowning scene of the Hasmonsean high-priest's triumph in Jerusalem. Josephus describes it for us Jannseus holding carousal with the women of his harem, and below, where the feasters can see them, a spectacle of eight hundred crosses, every one with its tormented body, and some with dead bodies besides at their foot the dead bodies of those most loved by the men upon the crosses, butchered before their dying eyes. The king after this was no more troubled by insurrection. What remained of the Pharisaic party, some 8000 men, we are told, fled beyond the reach of his arm. Jannseus died campaigning in 76 B.C. at the siege of some fortress beyond Jordan. He left his political power to his wife, his high-priest- hood to his son. Josephus tells us that on his death-bed he urged her to make peace with the Pharisees. One would like to know whether this I 1 30 THE HASMON.EAN ASCENDANCY is true, and, if it is true, whether his motive was a troubled conscience or policy. In the collection of writings which make up the book of Enoch, the vision to which we referred just now it represented, you will remember, the Hasmonsean prince as the champion and restorer of Israel is followed by another writing, whose contrast shows that revulsion in the attitude of the religious party which had taken place in the interval between their two dates. It is a torrent of denunciation against the wicked rich, the "men of earth," in terms which obviously suggested the language used in the Epistle of St. James. " Woe to you, ye rich, for ye have trusted in your riches and from your riches ye shall depart, because ye have not remembered the Most High in the days of your riches. Ye have committed blasphemy and unrighteousness and have become ready for the day of slaughter and the day of darkness and the day of great judgment." 1 " Woe to you, ye mighty, who with might oppress the righteous ; for the day of your destruction will come." 2 We recognise the features of the Sadducean aristoc- racy, when we find these rich men reproached for not keeping separate from sinners, 8 for put- ting forth writings which tend to seduce men from the Law, 4 for refusing to protect the people of which they are rulers from those " who devoured and dispersed and murdered them." 5 When the righteous die, these sinners speak over them, say- ing, "As we die, so die the righteous, and what benefit do they reap from their deeds? Behold, 1 xciv. 8, 9. 2 xcvi. 8. 8 xcvii. 4 ; xcix. 2. 4 xcviii. 15 ; civ. 10. 6 ciii. 14, 15. THE HOPE OF THE RIGHTEOUS 131 even as we, so do they die in grief and darkness, and what advantage have they over us ? from henceforth we are equal." It was the old ques- tion put to Ben-Sira, but the Pharisaic writer has a better answer to it than Ben-Sira, for he bids the righteous know most assuredly " that all goodness and joy and glory are prepared for them, and are written down for the spirits of those who have died in righteousness." "The spirits of you who die in righteousness will live and rejoice and be glad, and their spirits will not perish, but their memorial will be before the face of the Great One unto all generations of the world." 2 "Be hopeful ; for aforetime we were put to shame through ills and affliction; but soon ye will shine as the stars of heaven, ye will shine and ye will be seen, and the portals of heaven will be opened to you." 8 "Ye will become companions of the host of heaven." 4 1 cii. 6, 7. 2 ciii. 3, 4. 8 civ. 2. * civ. 6. THE FALL OF THE HASMON^EANS AND THE DAYS OF HEROD WE have followed the steps by which the Has- monaean family raised itself to the chief power in the Jewish community, obtained possession of the high-priesthood, added to the priestly dignity the state of kings, and achieved, as kings, a series of conquests. The expansion of their power had reached its limits at the death of Jannaeus Alex- ander in 76, and Queen Alexandra, his widow who succeeded him, rested upon her throne, a Solomonic reign of peace again following the reign of battles. But the reign of Alexandra or Salome, by her Hebrew name is chiefly re- markable as the one moment, when the Pharisees, so lately persecuted and afflicted, so soon to be persecuted again, had a brief enjoyment of political power. Salome Alexandra, whether from her own inclination or from the death-bed counsels of her husband, was altogether in their hands. Hence, her days in rabbinic tradition are a time of miraculous blessedness. The rain used to fall regularly at the most convenient moment, when travellers might not be abroad, during the night before the Sabbath-day, " so that the grains of wheat became as large as kidneys, those of barley like the stones of olives, and the lentils like gold denarii." But under the surface of peace the 132 THE REIGN OF ALEXANDRA 133 disease of the state was still active. The Pharisees would not forego the opportunity to have their revenge. It was perhaps not unnatural that the memory of those 800 crosses should inflame them. There were fresh executions in Jerusalem, only now it was the members of the aristocracy who fell, those who had shared in the warlike enter- prises of Jannseus and were held to have abetted him in his crimes. The Sadducean nobility, joined to the Hasmonsean house in common ambitions and political interests, devoted to the national dynasty, now saw itself abandoned by the queen to slaughter. It beset her with bitter reproaches and found a champion in the younger son of the late king, Aristobulus. The elder son Hyrcanus, who officiated as high-priest under his mother's rule, was a feeble helpless creature, who had no desires beyond a quiet life. The military element in the Jewish community had been mainly on the side of Jannseus, and it was this element whose discontent became dan- gerous. Alexandra was obliged to leave most of the strong places of the kingdom in their hands. When the queen at last fell ill and Aristobulus ranged the country, calling upon the garrisons to rise, they readily joined him. The terrified leaders of the people clamoured about the bed of the queen ; but it was too late ; there was no help more for them in Alexandra; while the rebels were gather- ing outside Jerusalem, she passed away (B.C. 67). We are now on the threshold of that time in whose convulsions the Hasmonaean house perished, and it will be difficult, I fear, to present the course of events in any way that does not leave you with 134 THE FALL OF THE HASMONJEANS the impression of mere tumultuous confusion. Note for one thing, that the circumstances of the Jewish state are no longer such as they have been since the break-up of the Seleucid kingdom. That break-up, as we saw, made a space for the free action of the smaller states of Syria the Jews, the Nabatseans, and others so that we were able to follow the movements of the Jewish state without much refer- ence to the events of the larger world. But now this is so no more. The great powers of west and east, Rome and Parthia, drew under their dominion the lands which had been ruled by Alexander and Seleucus, and every convulsion through which the huge Roman state passed in its course of trans- formation from a republic to a monarchy had its effect in Judaea. Let me try at any rate to fix for you the leading personalities and the main out- line of events. Aristobulus we have already seen as the cham- pion of the Sadducean nobility ; he inherited the fierce spirit, and followed the policy, of his father. The Pharisees, when Alexandra was gone, made an effort to check his advance upon Jerusalem, but the Jewish soldiery were on his side, and after Aristo- bulus had won a victory near Jericho, it was agreed that he, although the younger son, should become king and high -priest, and that Hyrcanus should retire into private life. But now we first detect a sinister figure standing behind Hyrcanus, and working his own designs through the person of the passive elder son of Jannseus. You remember that the Jews had compelled the Idumaeans to become one people with themselves. This action bore bitter fruit to the Jews. It had come about ANTIPATER THE IDUM^EAN 135 that under Jannaeus a prominent Idumaean called Antipas had held the post of governor in his native province. His son Antipater was at this moment a person of influence in Jerusalem, and the history of the following years consists in large part of a stubborn conflict of battle and intrigue between Antipater the Idumaean on one side, with Hyrcanus for his tool, and the old nobility upon the other led by Aristobulus II. and later on by his sons. The first retirement therefore of Hyrcanus was soon cancelled by Antipater, and he opened war upon the younger brother. In the course of that long struggle Jerusalem was wrested to and fro between Antipater or Antipater's son and the younger Hasmonaean princes, so that by marking plainly in our minds their respective turns of possession we shall best have this period in in- telligible shape before our minds. Aristobulus, you see, is in possession to start with, and the first move of Antipater is to call the Nabataean power upon the scene, in order to reinstate Hyr- canus. He made Hyrcanus flee to Petra, the Nabataean capital ; and he induced the Nabataean king, Aretas III. Phil-hellen, to invade Judaea. So that in 65, two years after the death of Queen Alexandra, what we see is Aristobulus beleaguered on the Temple-hill, and the Nabataean army with Antipater and Hyrcanus round about Jerusalem. But now we must look beyond Judaea at the great events taking place in the world. It was, I suppose, certain that, the Seleucid kingdom hav- ing broken up, some other great power or powers would ultimately seize the inheritance. Twenty years before this time, three competitors had stood i 3 6 THE FALL OF THE HASM01SLEANS before the world. Firstly there was Rome, which had become an Asiatic power by taking over the Pergamene kingdom in Asia Minor ; secondly, there was the kingdom of Pontus in Asia Minor, then represented by the great Mithridates; and thirdly, there was Armenia, which suddenly expanded into a great power under Tigranes. Mithridates and Tigranes were for the time allied in a common dread of Rome. In 83 B.C. the Armenians invaded Syria and swept away the miserable claimants to the Seleucid throne before them. Northern Syria be- came a province of Armenia. The Armenian flood came southward till it touched the fringes of the Jewish kingdom. That was in the days of Queen Alexandra, and she made haste to conciliate the new conqueror by embassies and presents. But before she died the Armenian peril had passed away. The first of the competitors I mentioned, Rome, had closed in bitter earnest with its rivals. The Armenian king had to withdraw his armies from Syria in 69 to face the legions of Lucullus in the heart of his kingdom. Three years later (66) the conduct of the eastern war was committed by Rome to Pompey, and the ensuing campaigns not only drove Mithridates northward to the Crimea, but made Pompey master of the whole of Asia up to the Euphrates, and entailed upon him the task of carrying through a fresh settlement and organisa- tion of these lands in the name of Rome. In this way the Jewish princes who were quarrelling over the Hasmonsean inheritance suddenly found that battles fought far away had given the disposal of these things into a new hand. When Pompey's lieutenant appeared in 65 at Damascus, an im- THE ADVENT OF POMPEY 137 perious word caused the Nabatsean army to vanish from Jerusalem, and the war between the two brothers was transferred to another field, the audi- ence-chamber of the Roman officer, and was waged with weapons of a more precious metal than iron. In 63 Pompey himself came to Damascus, and it throws some light upon the real significance of the Hasmonsean dynasty, when we learn that, beside the two brothers, there came from Jerusalem an embassy which spoke for the Jewish people, and begged the conqueror to relieve them altogether of kings, and restore the old order under which their fathers had lived in quietness. Pompey gave no definite answer to any petitioner and advanced on Jerusalem. Once more the holy soil was trodden by the armies of a great Gentile power. The days of national independence were over. Before Pompey reached Jerusalem, he had made Aristobulus, whose conduct had been suspicious, a prisoner. But all that was most warlike in the Jewish people had looked upon Aristobulus as their leader, and even with their king a prisoner, they would not surrender the city to the Gentile. On the other hand Antipater the Idumsean knew the power of the Roman arms. From now onwards his policy, and the policy of his house, never wavered ; always to be a friend of Rome, or when the Roman oligarchy was itself divided into warring camps, of whichever side for the time was pre- dominant. So that when Pompey actually appeared before the city, the party of Hyrcanus, that is, of course, of Antipater, was for letting him in. The party of Aristobulus abandoned the rest of the city and took refuge on the fortified Temple-hill. It i 3 8 THE FALL OF THE HASMONJEANS became necessary for Pompey to undertake a regular siege of the Temple. The party of Hyrcanus showed themselves zealous allies. The third month of the siege on a Sabbath day the Temple was taken. And if we have had great fault to find with the priesthood, it is fair to remember the conduct of those priests who were officiating in the Temple courts when the enemy broke in. They went quietly on with their service as if nothing unusual were happening, and were cut down as they stood. Is it that a fearless piety still lived on in the lower ranks of the priesthood, or have we an example of high-bred aristocratic pride ? Like Antiochus Epiphanes, Pompey insisted on entering the innermost sanctuary of the Temple. But, although doubtless the Jews felt the outrage, the comparison with Antiochus made Pompey' s conduct seem mild. For he abstained from taking away any of the riches which he saw, and he did not attempt to interfere with the Jewish religion. It was only the political status and the territorial extent of the Jewish state which suffered by his arrangements. There was to be no more any king ; Hyrcanus was to be high-priest only, with the functions, and perhaps the title, of ethnarch ; the Jewish state was to be a division of the Koman province of Syria, which Pompey now called into being, and pay tribute to Kome. A great part of the conquests of the Jews out- side Judsea were detached they still retained Galilee and Idumsea and the ravages they wrought in the neighbouring lands were repaired ; once more cities of Greek culture arose from their humiliation or their ruins. Aristobulus Pompey took with him to Rome, and when Pompey went in triumphal JUDAEA UNDER THE ROMAN REPUBLIC 139 procession, the Hasmonaean prince had to walk in the train of captives before the eyes of a Eoman crowd. From 63 to 40, Hyrcanus holds the high-priest- hood and Antipater the power in Jerusalem. But they were far from quiet years ; during them the Roman state was torn with civil war. First came the war between the oligarchy and Julius Caesar from 49 to 45, in the course of which Pompey, the leader on the republican side, was assassinated on the Egyptian sea- shore, in 48. Then came the murder of Caesar in 44 and the war between the oligarchs on the side under Brutus and Cassius, and Mark Antony and Caesar's nephew Octavian on the other, at the conclusion of which Antony became master of the eastern provinces of Rome and made a number of changes in their government. Now through all these storms Hyrcanus and Antipater maintained their seat, but their position was affected by the successive crises. For the first fourteen years, from 63 to 48, the Roman world was still governed by the Republic, and Syria obeyed a series of proconsuls, according to the system established by Pompey. The spirit of the Roman government in this period toward the Jews was one of severe coercion. In 57 the power of Hyrcanus seems to have been still further reduced by the pro- consul Gabinius, so that nothing but his religious functions were left him, whilst the Jewish territory itself was divided into five administrative districts. In 54 the next proconsul, Marcus Crassus robbed the Temple of a great part of its riches. This period also saw a succession of attempts on the part of the other Hasmonsean princes to raise Judaea in i 4 o THE FALL OF THE HASMON^EANS their interest. We can count three. The first rising was headed by Alexander, the son of Aristobulus in 57 ; it was defeated by Gabinius, under whom Mark Antony served as a young officer, and was ended by the reduction of the fortress Alexandrium, where Alexander made his last stand. Alexander was captured, but not put to death. The second rising in 56 was headed by Aristobulus himself and another son called Anti- gonus, who had both escaped from captivity; this likewise was defeated by Gabinius, and ended by the reduction of Machaerus, the fortress where John the Baptist afterwards was beheaded ; Aristobulus was caught again and sent back to Rome. The third attempt was made by Alexander again in 55, and ended in his force being shattered by Gabinius near Mount Tabor. Even after this the peace of the land was troubled by Jewish bands, till the quaestor Cassius about 5 1 acting as governor after the death of Marcus Crassus you know this Cassius as the murderer of Caesar later on sold 30,000 of them into slavery. In 49 hostilities began between Julius Caesar and the Roman oligarchs under Pompey, and in the next year Caesar won the decisive battle of Pharsalus in Greece, which was followed by Pompey's assassination by the people of King Ptolemy when he tried to land in Egypt. The moment the fortune of the war had declared itself, Antipater was a devoted friend of Caesar's, and was really useful to him during the campaign in Egypt in 47. In consequence the Jews got back by Caesar's new regulations much that they had lost under the republican regime. The five administra- CJESAR AND CASSIUS 141 tive districts were once more united under the authority of the high-priest, who was now allowed to call himself ethnarch. They also recovered some of the territory taken away by Pompey, and notably the harbour-town of Joppa, which was of such consequence to them. It is worth remarking that at Home also Julius Caesar was conspicuous as a friend of the Jews. Of course, the situation changed again at his murder in 44. Now it was the forces of the oligarchy under Cassius who occupied Syria, and Antipater was prompt with his services to the power in possession. Although the Jews of Palestine suffered fearfully from the exactions and severities of Cassius, nothing could wear out the patience and diligence of the supple Idumsean. But his life and scheming were cut short at this moment by a private feud. He was poisoned by one of the Jewish notables, who hoped to supplant him in his place of power. We may pause here and turn from the series of political events, in order to listen to a voice coming from the inner life of the Jewish people. There is a book called the Psalter of Solomon, a collection of nineteen psalms, known to us in a Greek transla- tion. By means of it we can regard the features of that troublous time as they are reflected in the ardent thought and feeling of the Pharisaic saints who lived through it. The fierce partisan spirit which agitated those of their brethren who fought for Hyrcanus or for Aristobulus does not prevail in their quiet circle ; they stand aloof from the struggle of factions, and only see the sadness of it, when the blood of Israelites, of " the dwellers in Jerusalem, is poured out like water" by the Gentile 1 42 THE FALL OF THE HASMON^EANS conqueror. 1 It was with terror, and anguish for the land and city, that they saw Pompey draw near. 2 " It is the sound of a mighty people as of an exceeding mighty wind ! It is as the tempest of a mighty fire rushing through the wilderness. . . . My loins were broken at the hearing thereof; my knees were loosed ; my heart was afraid ; my bones were shaken like flax/' 8 And then the reception of Pompey by the party of Hyrcanus seemed to them to show that the leaders of the people had lost all sense of their degradation, of the terrible blow which this man " from the utmost part of the earth," 4 this unclean alien, 5 had come to deal Israel. " The princes of the land met him with joy ; they said unto him, Blessecl is thy path! Come ye, enter in with peace. They made the rough paths even before their entering in, they opened the gates that led into Jerusalem ; her walls they crowned with garlands. He entered in as a father entereth into his sons' house, in peace." 6 There followed the dreadful days of the siege of the Temple, when " the strongholds, yea and the wall of Jerusalem were occupied " by the Gentile, 7 when he " cast down fenced walls with a battering-ram," and when " strange peoples went up against thine altar, and trampled it down with their sandals in their pride." 8 The Psalmists were no friends of Aristobulus and the nobility, but when they saw the blood run in the holy places, when they saw the great men of the Jewish senate carried off to be a derision to the heathen in the far West, 9 they were grieved 1 Ps. viii. 23. 2 Pa. i 2. * Ps. viii. 2, 5, 6. 4 Ps. viii. 1 6. 6 Ps. xvii. 9 ; ii. I. 6 Ps. viii. 18-20. 7 Ps. viii. 21. 8 Ps. ii. I, 2. 9 Ps. xvii. 14. THE PSALMS OF THE PHARISEES 143 for the affliction of their people and moved to cry out " Do thou chasten us in thy good pleasure, but give us not over to the Gentiles." l Nothing however was farther from their thoughts than to question the justice of the visitation. To "justify God," to "justify the judgments of God" is with them an essential part of piety. 2 And they draw in blackest colours the sins which had cried to heaven. Jerusalem had fermented with secret abominations, 3 and shameful things had been wrought openly before the sun. 4 But, above all, the immor- ality of the priesthood and the Hasmonsean usurpa- tion they find no language too strong to condemn. In the fourth Psalm, composed perhaps before the blow had fallen, their voice as they denounce the profane one who sits in the Council, the wicked Sadducee magnate, breaks in an explosion of cursing. The Hasmonseans had seized upon the sacred office, which no heir of the true line was there to claim, but their service was a sacrilege. " The holy things of God they took for spoil ; and there was no in- heritor to deliver out of their hand. They went up to the altar of the Lord when they were full of all uncleanness ; yea, even in their separation they polluted the sacrifices, eating them like profane meats. They left not a sin undone, wherein they offended not above the heathen." 5 They had usurped not only the high-priesthood, but the kingship, which belonged to the house of David. " Thou, O Lord, didst choose David to be king over Israel, and didst swear unto him touching his seed for ever, that his kingdom should not fail before thee. But when 1 Ps. vii. 3. a Ps. ii. 16 ; iv. 9 ; viii. 31. 3 i. 7 ; viii. gf. * Ps. ii. 14. 5 Ps. viii. 12-14. 144 THE FALL OF THE HASMON^EANS we sinned, sinners rose up against us; they fell upon us and thrust us out : even they to whom thou madest no promise, took away our place with violence." * This disillusionment, after all the hopes which had centred in the national dynasty, made the old words of promise to the house of David acquire a new force and meaning to the apprehension of the faithful. The authors of these psalms look away from the wickedness and shame of their time, from the Hasmonsean kingdom with its draggled purple and sordid glories, to another king, whom God Him- self shall raise up unto Israel at the time ordained 2 the Son of David, realising in his own person that ideal of purity after which the Pharisee strove, who " shall thrust out the sinners from the inheritance," and " gather together a holy people, whom he shall lead in righteousness." " He shall not suffer iniquity to lodge in their midst; and none that knoweth wickedness shall dwell with them. . . . And he shall purge Jerusalem and make it holy, even as it was in the days of old. So that the nations may come from the ends of the earth to see his glory, bringing as gifts her sons that had fainted, and may see the glory of the Lord, wherewith God hath glorified her." 8 From that bright city of vision we must drop to earth again, to the Jerusalem of Hyrcanus and Anti- pater. We had followed events up to the moment when Antipater was suddenly cut off by poison. The deed brought no profit to the doer. Instantly the place of Antipater was taken by his sons, Herod and Phasael, and the murderer was ensnared by their contrivance and killed. Herod was at this 1 Ps. xvii. 5, 6. 2 Ps. xvii. 23. 3 Pa. xvii. HEROD AND PHASAEL 145 time (43 B.C.) twenty-nine years old. He had already been governor of Galilee and shown his strong hand in crushing the bandit - chief Hezekiah ; he had already so alarmed the Jerusalem aristocracy, that nothing but the favour of the Roman governor had saved him on one occasion from being condemned to death. He showed before long that he had also inherited his father's adroitness in trimming, for the Roman East once again changed masters when Antony and Octavian beat Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in 42. Antony, to whose share the East fell, soon declared himself as friendly to the family of Antipater, and we note fresh modification in the position at Jerusalem. Once more Hyrcanus was deprived of all political functions and left with only the high-priesthood, but now the political direction of the Jewish state was formally committed by Antony to Herod and Phasael, together with the title of tetrarch. The next change was of a much more violent kind. In all revolutions of the Roman state, the Idumsean steersmen of the Jewish state were able to shift the helm with such agility as to avoid shipwreck ; the next storm was not a conflict of Roman factions, but a momentary displacement of Roman power altogether. In the year 40, when Rome was still represented in the East by Mark Antony, a Parthian army overran Syria, and riding on the crest of the Parthian wave came the Has- monaean prince, Antigonus, the son of Aristobulus II. This was too much for the skill of Phasael and Herod. Phasael was taken and killed by the Par- thians, Herod fled, and once more Jerusalem obeyed a Hasmonsean king. Hyrcanus was carried off a K 1 46 THE FALL OF THE HASMONJ3ANS prisoner to Babylon, his ears cropped, so as to disqualify him for the priestly office. The national Sadducean aristocracy, relieved from the hated pre- dominance of the parvenu Idumseans, had their last spell of power. The Romans answered by proclaim- ing Herod King of the Jews ; Herod had found his way to Rome, and it was in Rome that his elevation to royalty took place. Of course, by this time the generals of Mark Antony had grappled with the Parthians in Syria, and Herod returned in 39 to Palestine to fight in co-operation with the Roman forces for his own return. The vicissitudes of that fight between the two kings of the Jews, the Idu- msean recognised by Rome and the Hasmonsean upheld by the national aristocracy, need not occupy us now. Enough that by the end of 38 nothing but Jerusalem itself was left to King Antigonus ; Herod was master of all the Jewish territory out- side. In 37 Herod laid siege to Jerusalem and the Roman governor, Gaius Sosius, brought up an army to his support. Once more Jerusalem was taken, and Antigonus, the last Hasmonsean king, was the first king whom the Romans beheaded. Herod begins that reign which extends unbroken till we reach the confines of the New Testament narrative (37-4 B.C.). For the first years of his reign Herod's position was very far from safe. The series of revolutions in the Roman world had not yet reached its term. At the time Herod ascended his throne in Jerusalem, Mark Antony, as we saw, was the ruler of the Roman East, and Herod, of course, was Antony's man, heart and soul. But even during the time of Antony's rule there were dangers for Herod : HEROD AND HIS ENEMIES 147 for Cleopatra the queen of Egypt was hostile to him, and although, for reasons of policy, Antony was his friend, it was never certain whether the in- fluence of Cleopatra with Antony might not overhear reasons of policy. Then the war between Antony and the ruler of the West, Octavianus Caesar, brought new dangers, for Herod supported Antony with zeal, and when Antony was broken and Caesar came out master of the whole Roman world, after the battle of Actium in 31 B.C. it was a question whether Caesar would regard Herod favourably. When this crisis was happily past, and Caesar not only received him into favour, but enlarged his territory, so that it included, besides the Philistine coast with Gaza, Joppa, and Straton's-Tower, some districts also east of the Jordan, there were no more changes in the Eoman Empire to disquiet him. But it was not till a few years later, till 25 B.C., that he finally got rid of the internal danger which menaced him from the Hasmonaean house. And that danger he only got rid of by the most ugly surgery, for so long as any representatives of the Hasmonaean family lived, the national sentiment clung to their persons. One of his first steps in coming into power had been to put forty-five of the leaders of the old aristocracy to death, and by 25 B.C. all the remaining members of the Hasmonsean family had come to a violent end by his orders even the old Hyrcanus, his father's friend, who had come back from Babylon, at Herod's invitation, in the hope of ending his days peaceably at Jerusalem. One princess of the Has- monsean house, Mariamne, the grand-daughter both of Hyrcanus and Aristobulus II., Herod had himself married. I dare say you know, most of you, the 148 THE FALL OF THE HASMON^EANS tragedy in which that marriage issued how the cold reserve of Mariamne, moving among the Edomite destroyers of her house, a Hebrew of the blood royal, affected the stormy passion of Herod only by adding to it the sharpness of an exquisite despair, but irri- tated the women of the upstart family to bitter hatred, how they found means to make Herod believe that she was unfaithful to him, and how in the rage of baffled love he killed her, and then almost went mad with longing and remorse. By the slaying of the sons of Babas in 25 B.C. the Hasmonsean blood became extinct, except for such as ran in the veins of Herod's own children by Mariamne, his sons Alexander and Aristobulus and two daughters. It is easy to grasp the characteristics of Herod the Great so far as to see embodied in him a type perpetually recurrent in history, especially in oriental history. There is a great general resem- blance between all those shapers of kingdoms in unsettled times men strong of hand, unscrupulous, merciless to all rivals, vehement livers, but shrewd in vision, who when established in power bring to their subjects such good as goes with public order strongly enforced, and find their pride in great works which tend to increase the prosperity of their realms. That description fits Herod as it would fit many another man who has risen to power Peter the Great, Mohammed Ali of Egypt, the list might be made a long one but I do not know that we can be more precise, so as to distinguish Herod from others of the class. He seems perhaps to have been more than usually vulnerable on the side of his affections, which quality however, being played HEKOD AND HIS WORK 149 upon by intriguers, caused him to be goaded into crimes which a man of a colder heart would have avoided. But it also saves him, in spite of his barbarism and deeds of blood, from being altogether repulsive. His reign certainly brought some good things to his people. We can see that at his accession Pales- tine was suffering from a complete break-up of all public order. The convulsions of the last twelve years had replaced society by chaos. The land was the prey of bands of robbers. Herod restored order with an iron hand which the robbers found could reach them even in their most inaccessible holds. The ordinary business of human intercourse could be gradually resumed, and in this way Herod also prepared in the wilderness a highway for the Christ The material prosperity and dignity of the land was increased by a rapid growth of new cities under his directing eye. One of these was the new Samaria, which rose in 27 B.C. to take the place of the city destroyed by John Hyrcanus seventy-seven years before, with the new name of Sebaste, given it in honour of Csesar, who received the surname of Augustus in that year ; the Greeks translated Augustus by Sebastos. The most illustrious of all was the city which replaced Straton's-Tower on the coast. This also was named in honour of Csesar, Csesarea. Its building took twelve years ( 2 2- 1 o B. c. ) and included the construction of a manificent harbour, no doubt to the great advantage of Jewish commerce. Csesarea was the second city of the kingdom, and later on, when Judaea was a Roman province, the seat of the procurator was here, and not at Jerusalem. ISO THE FALL OF THE HASMON^EANS Are we to regard this king of the Jews as being a Jewish king ? His family, no doubt, was Edomite, but it had been Jewish in practice and in status for at least two generations before him. Herod himself in such externals as circumcision conformed to the Law. His sons, as we saw, inherited the blood of the Hasmonaeans. Probably if Herod had followed the Jewish traditions with any zeal, the nation would have overlooked the discredit of his extraction ; but if he was regarded as an alien, it was only too true that his interests and ambitions lay far outside the sphere of Judaism. He wished to be a great king among the kings of the world, and that in those days meant to be a Hellenistic king. Herod wished to leave no room for doubt as to the genuineness of his Hellenism. His court was full of the usual crowd of Greek parasites. Among his most trusted advisers was Nicolas of Damascus, whose standing as a rhetorician and man of letters was really consider- able. One fragmentary notice gives us a delightful glimpse of the way Herod's studies in the field of Greek culture were conducted. " Herod's ardour for philosophy," it says, " evaporated, as is usually the case with those in high station, who are sur- rounded by too many good things to persevere, and his next passion was rhetoric. Nicolas was now compelled to study rhetoric with him, and they com- posed speeches together. Soon he changed again and fell in love with history. Nicolas expressed approval : he said that it was a study intimately connected with the duties of a citizen, and that it was useful for a king too to be informed as to the achievements and the events of the past. Herod entered impulsively upon the new field and he HEROD AS HELLENIST AND JEW 151 urged Nicolas to take up historical writing." l To the world Herod advertised the sterling quality of his Hellenism in the usual form of munificence to Greek cities. He built for them temples and stoas and baths. His name was remembered as a benefactor in Athens and Sparta and Ehodes. At Antioch a colonnade running down either side of the principal street was a constant reminder to the citizens of Herod's zeal. In his own kingdom, the new cities he built were of Hellenistic type and he was deterred by no scruple from rearing temples in them to the deity of Csesar. Even in the confines of Jerusalem he built a theatre and an amphitheatre. One could hardly expect the Jews to regard such a king as a son of Israel. 2 At the same time Herod did not abjure his other r61e however inconsistent of a Jewish national king. In the negative way, he abstained from putting the image of any living thing upon his coinage, or from introducing any graven image into Jerusalem at any rate till quite the last years of his reign. A curious story is told us of the trophies which he set up in the theatre at Jerusalem in honour of the victories of Csesar. These were of the kind usual in antiquity, suits of armour arranged upon poles, and, of course, looked something like statues of armed men. The public at Jerusalem was 1 Mutter's Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, iii. p. 350. a One may notice here the absurdity of the guise in which Herod was made to appear recently in the drama of Mr. Stephen Phillips. Mr. Tree was got up with scrupulous inaccuracy as an Assyrian monarch with a long curled beard ! Of course, the real Herod would have worn the garb of Greek civilisation and was probably clean-shaven according to the fashion of the Greco-Roman world at that time. To represent him as an Assyrian is very much as if one should represent His Highness the Khedive arrayed as a Calif of the Arabian Nights. 152 THE FALL OF THE HASMON^EANS profoundly disturbed, and it might have come to a formidable tumult, had not Herod invited the leaders of the people to examine his trophies more closely. Under their suspicious scrutiny, the armour of a trophy was piece by piece removed till the bare pole stood revealed in its unimpeachable innocence. Herod also abstained from contracting family alli- ances with any outside the community of Israel ; the hand of his daughters was for none except men circumcised. Nor was it only in negative ways that he consulted Jewish sentiment. There was now an immense scattered body of Jews all over the Roman world, exposed in different places to annoyance from their Gentile fellow-townsmen or to requisitions on the part of Gentile magistrates which clashed with their religion. Herod persistently used his influence, as a king and a friend of Caesar's, to protect the Jews of the Dispersion, and considering the solidarity of the whole Jewish community such benefits could not but be appreciated at Jerusalem. 1 The chief work by which he appealed to Jewish feeling was one in which he could also gratify his pride the rebuilding of the Temple on a scale of new magnificence. It was not without misgivings that the Jews learnt that the existing Temple, the House raised with such hopes by Zerubbabel, with shouting and tears, five hundred years before, the House associated with so many memories of their fathers, was to disappear ; but Herod promised that the work of demolition should not begin till the waggons and stones were waiting on the spot to begin the reconstruction. The 1 One is reminded of the way in which the French Government has often been the protector of Roman Catholic missions abroad whilst its home policy has been severely coercive with regard to the Church. THE NEW TEMPLE 153 workmen on the new Temple were all priests who had been specially trained. And so in 20-19 B.C. the building began which was still going on when the Lord taught in the Temple courts. "Then answered the Jews and said unto him, Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days ? " l And that the splendour of the new Temple was not lost upon the Jewish community is indicated by that passage of the gospels where the Lord's disciples, men of the people, draw his attention to its glory. "Master, see what manner of stones and what buildings are here." z It is perhaps worth noticing that even here the style of architecture bore witness to the prevail- ing Greek culture ; the Corinthian column, with its florid capital, everywhere in vogue after the days of Alexander, gave its distinctive note to the whole. 8 The last years of Herod (13-4 B.C.) were made miserable by the intrigues of his household. Herod was quite oriental in his polygamy, and it is the usual effect of polygamy in an oriental court to divide it against itself. The two sons of Mariamne stood of course higher in prestige than the children of Herod's baser wives, and were the mark of relent- less jealousies. The malignant woman Salome, Herod's sister, who was in great part responsible for the death of Mariamne, was still at his elbow to poison his mind according to the course of her own enmities. The story of those dreadful years at the Jewish court is given at length by Josephus, the ramifying plots and counter-plots, the web of treacheries. And in the midst of his tor- mentors, blind and savage, the old king, like a 1 John ii. 19. 2 Mark xiii. i. 8 Joseph. Ant. xv. 11, 5, . 414. 154 THE FALL OF THE HASM01SLEANS baited bull, wounds wildly, not 'knowing friend from foe. His very suspicions create the treachery which he fears. He makes forlorn attempts to escape from the ring, to get the love of his sons. But he knows not whom to trust, and who is there that can trust him ? He tries to clear the situation, to lay hold of the truth, by the ruthless application of torture, and the situation gets steadily worse. At last the sons of Mariamne are put to death at his command. And then Herod finds that the real traitor was that other son of his, Antipater, who had been their accuser. By the end of the year 5 B.C. Herod lay upon his death-bed. He was carried to the hot springs of Callirhoe east of Jordan. But his disease was beyond cure. He died in the early spring of the following year (B.C. 4), at Jericho, shortly before the Passover. Five days before he died he had received from Rome the permission which allowed him to put Antipater to death. Other sons, whose youth had saved them from entanglements, survived him, and the kingdom was divided by Caesar among Archelaus, Herod Antipas, and Philip. Archelaus got Judaea proper, Antipas Galilee, and Philip the regions of the north-east. But they were no longer allowed to bear the name of kings. Archelaus was only ethnarch, and his two brothers tetrarchs. Galilee, when Jesus went about it preaching, was still governed by Herod Antipas, the Herod who put John the Baptist to death. But Judaea was then no longer under Archelaus. In the year 6 A.D. the Romans had deposed him for misgovernment, and since then that part of Herod the Great's kingdom had been governed by Roman procur- HEROD AND THE ARISTOCRACY 155 ators, sitting in Caesarea. Pontius Pilate was only in Jerusalem for the special occasion of the great feast, when Jesus was brought to his judgment seat. In speaking of that moment we glance on to a time long after the days of King Herod, and to those days I return once more, to ask more particularly the question, how those days, so bril- liant to an outside view, appear if we try to look at them from within, from the point of view of the Jewish people ? As far as the Sadducean aristocracy, the warlike party who had adhered to the last Hasmonaeans, are concerned, the question is hardly worth raising. They, of course, regarded the power which dispossessed them with implacable hostility, and Herod knew of no method of dealing with them, except the knife, and, as we saw, he had, when he took Jerusalem from Antigonus in 37, immediately put the forty-five most pro- minent members of the aristocracy to death probably, that is, half the Senate. He also took care to allow no high-priest to imperil his throne by any possibility of rivalry. The high-priestly office was now held only by his own nominees, his creatures whom he set up and plucked down at his pleasure. One of them came from Babylon, another belonged to an Alexandrian family. When he tried the experiment of putting in a child of the Hasmonsean house, the boy Aristobulus, as a measure likely to win him popularity, the general enthusiasm convinced him that it was by no means safe, and he had Aristobulus murdered. All his subsequent high-priests were nobodies. The attitude of the Pharisaic party towards 156 THE FALL OF THE HASMONJ3ANS Herod is not so easy to define. In some ways he would be less liable to give offence than the Hasmonseans. It was an advantage that he did not himself hold the high-priesthood, for the sin most poignantly felt in the case of the Hasmoneean priesthood had been that they ministered about the holy things, while not observing the Pharisaic rules of purity. And the Pharisees, as we saw, cared far more about the high-priesthood than about the political supremacy. Probably there were con- siderable variations within the Pharisaic party itself in the way they regarded the rule of Herod. It seems to have been a prevalent feeling that the political power, which belonged by right to the house of David, was entirely a matter for God's disposal. So long as He suffered it to be usurped by an alien, it was a chastisement which Israel should patiently endure, and await God's good time for bringing in the rightful king, not by the arm of flesh, but by miraculous intervention. When Herod ordered the people to take an oath of allegi- ance to him, the Pharisees as a body doggedly refused. His right they would not recognise, but neither were they minded actively to rebel. It is justly insisted upon, as a significant fact, by modern writers on this period that the two most prominent Pharisaic doctors of the day, called by Josephus Polion and Sameas, were treated with great honour and consideration by the Herodian court. Of course, any infringement of the religious Law was a very different matter and goaded the Jew out of his passivity. At the end of his reign Herod seems to have taken unwise liberties in this di- rection. An eagle appears on some of his coins. THE PHARISEES AND THE PEOPLE 157 Worse still, on the new Temple itself the eyes of the religious detected with offence the gilt figure of an eagle among the decorations. When Herod's last illness relaxed some of the constraint on men's tongues, two rabbis of influence, Judas and Mat- thias, began boldly to impress upon their disciples how meritorious it would be to demolish the scandal, and on a premature report of the king's death, a mob led by the younger Pharisees, tore the eagle down. This provoked reprisals on the part of Herod, and the two rabbis, with a number of their disciples, were burnt at the stake. We cannot doubt that the people as a whole detested the Idumeean rule. Even its external splendour, even the building of the Temple, meant, as in the case of Solomon, grievous financial oppression, and apart from the moral and senti- mental injury which Israel sustained, there was the continuous material burden of heavy taxation. Isolated acts of remission at moments of special distress Herod indeed seems to have been ready to display such generosity as the necessities of his government and his ambitions allowed could not undo the effect of the regular system. The disciples of Judas and Matthias had the full sym- pathy of the people in that outbreak connected with the golden eagle, and when on the night after the burning of the two rabbis, the night of the i2th of March B.C. 4, there was an eclipse of the moon, the people of Jerusalem read in the portent the horror of Heaven at the martyrdom of saints. It maddened Herod upon his death-bed to think that the people would rejoice over his dead body, and he left it as a solemn charge to his sister Salome 158 THE FALL OF THE HASMONJEAJSTS to see that a large body of the notables whom he had summoned to Jericho was massacred instantly upon his decease, that the people might have matter enough for tears. Salome promised, but did not hold such a promise one necessary to keep. But whatever the people had felt, the Idumsean kept them under with a hand more rigorous than any of which they had had experience before. They were quiet under the paralysing incubus of a despotism which it was utterly hopeless to resist. The Pharisaic pietist had already learnt under the Hasmonaeans to turn away from this world to heaven, to the future ; and now under Herod, all the current of national feeling which had been set running during the last generations in such strength beat against a blind wall, and itself found no outlet save through the channels opened by the Pharisee. It was among the people bent down beneath that iron necessity that the transcendental beliefs, the Messianic hopes, nurtured in the Pharisaic schools, spread and propagated themselves with a new vitality. The few books of Pharisaic piety which have come down to us Enoch, the Psalms of Solomon, the Assumption of Moses and others show us indeed what ideas occupied the minds of writers, but they could not have shown what we learn from our Gospels how ideas of this order had permeated the people through and through, how the figure of the coming King, the "Anointed One," the " Son of David," how definite conceptions of the resurrection, of the other world, were part of the ordinary mental furniture of that common people which hung upon the words of the Lord. Sadduceism was only a withering survival, which ENOCH: THE SIMILITUDES 159 still clung to the higher priesthood, 1 and on the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. it disappeared with the priesthood from Israel. It was, according to Schtirer, under King Herod according to the learned English editor of Enoch, Professor Charles, in the latter days of Hasmonsean rule that the most remarkable of the documents in Enoch was delivered to the faithful. This writing extends, with interpolations, from chapter xxxvii. to chapter Ixx. in the book as we have it, and is ordinarily known as the Similitudes. Its general burden is the same as that of other apocalyptic writings, that the day is coming when the great injustice of the present world, the oppression of the righteous by the wicked, will be redressed, when the wicked will be judged, and the righteous enter into bliss. But its peculiar feature is the image it presents of him by whom judgment is done. He is no earthly son of David, and yet he has the form of a Son of Man. Enoch, carried into heaven, sees the Head of Days, the Lord of Spirits, and with Him, dwelling under the shadow of His wings, 2 is another Being, whose countenance has the appearance of a man, and his face is full of graciousness, like one of the holy angels. " And I asked the angel who went with me and showed me all the hidden things, concerning that Son of Man, who he was, and whence he was, and why he went with the Head of Days ? And he answered and said unto me, This is the Son of Man who hath righteousness, with whom dwelleth righteousness, and who revealeth all the treasures of that which is hidden, because the Lord of Spirits hath chosen him, and his lot before the 1 Acts iv. i. 2 mix. 7. 160 THE FALL OF THE HASMON JEANS Lord of Spirits hath surpassed everything in uprightness for ever." * The writing speaks of him as the Elect One, the Anointed. " Before the sun and the signs were created, before the stars of the heaven were made, his name was named before the Lord of Spirits. He will be a staff to the righteous on which they will support themselves and not fall, and he will be the light of the Gentiles and the hope of those who are troubled of heart. All who dwell on earth will fall down and bow the knee before him and will bless and laud and celebrate with song the Lord of Spirits. And for this reason hath he been chosen and hidden before him before the creation of the world and for evermore. And the wisdom of the Lord of Spirits hath revealed him to the holy and righteous, for he preserveth the lot of the righteous, because they have hated and despised this world of unrighteousness, and have hated all its works and ways in the name of the Lord of Spirits." 2 It is this Elect One, this mystic Son of Man, to whom all judgment is committed. He will judge even the works of the holy angels in heaven and weigh their deeds in the balance. 5 And his revelation in transcendent power upon earth will bring the reign of the wicked, of "the kings and the mighty " as they are regularly described in this writing, to a sudden end. The Lord of Spirits will cause his Elect One to sit upon the throne of his glory to judge in the fulness of wisdom, for "he is mighty in the secrets of righteousness " 4 and " no one will be able to utter a lying word before him " 5 " And in those days will the earth also give back those who are i. 1-3. 2 xlviii. 3-7. 3 lxi. 8. *xlix. 2. 6 xlix. 4. THE SON OF MAN T6i treasured up within it, and Sheol also will give back that which it hath received, and hell will give back that which it oweth." l A separation will take place between the righteous and the wicked. The kings and the mighty will worship the Son of Man and entreat for mercy, but they will shrink from his presence, " and their faces will be filled with shame, and darkness will be piled upon their faces. And the angels of punishment will take them in charge to execute vengeance on them, because they have oppressed his children and his elect." 2 The earth will be purified of all evil. " By the word of his mouth he shall slay all the sinners." 3 "And I will transform the earth and make it a blessing and cause Mine elect ones to dwell upon it ; but the sinners and evil-doers will not set foot thereon." 4 " Unrighteousness will disappear as a shadow and have no continuance." 5 The heavens also will be transformed and made an eternal blessing and light. 6 And in this new heaven and new earth the righteous will form a glorious church about the Person of the Son of Man. In the former age of the world the Son of Man had been hidden before God and only revealed in spiritual vision to the elect, but now "the congregation of the holy and elect will be sown, and all the elect will stand before him." 7 "The Eighteous and Elect One will cause the house of his congregation to appear." 8 " And the Lord of Spirits will abide over them, and with that Son of Man will they eat and lie down and rise up for ever and ever." 9 You cannot wonder that this book was widely 1 li. i. 2 lxii. 10, ii. 3 lxii. 2. 4 xlv. 5. 6 ilix. 2. 6 xlv. 4. 7 Ixii. 7, 8. 8 liii. 6. 9 htii. 14. 1 62 THE FALL OF THE HASMONJEANS read and loved in the early Christian Church. And yet it is not written altogether as a Christian would probably have written it. There is no hint of incarnation, of abasement, in the vision of this heavenly Being ; no shadow of death passes upon his countenance ; he is all through radiant and unearthly and victorious. But indeed the Christ whom the Christian worshipped was not the em- bodiment of any single one of those forms which had risen upon prophetic thought ; in Him all the hopes and ideals of the past met and blended ; the heavenly Son of Man and the earthly Son of David, the suffering Servant of the Hebrew prophet and the Slain God of the Greek mystic, the Wisdom of the Hebrew sage and the Logos of the Greek philosopher, all met in Him; but He was more than all. INDEX Aaron, sons of ; see Priests Abomination of desolation, 87 Abiib, Ptolemy son of, in Acco, 34; see Ptolemais Actium, battle of, 147 Adasa, battle of, 96 Adida, 107 Afghanistan, 3, 17, 23 Aggadah, 123, 124 Alcimus (Jakim), High-priest, 94, 96,97 Aleppo, 34 Alexander (i) the Great, 16-18, 20,21,22,26,28, 33, 34, 77, 86 (2) Balas, 101-104, IQ 6 (3) Jannseus, see 7aw- (4) son of Aristobulus H, 140 (5) son of Herod and Mariamne, 148, 153, 154 Alexandra (Salome), 129, 132, 133 136 Alexandretta, 17 Alexandria, 22, 31, 43, 46, 47; high - priest of Alexandrian origin, 155 Alexandrium, 140 Antigonus (i) Macedonian chief, 25 (2) son of John Hyr- canus, 114 ,115 (3) son of Aristobulus H., 140, 145, 146 163 Antioch (i) in Syria, 24, 31, 33, 73, 75, 80, 89, 91, 92, 94, 104, 105, (2) Nisibis, 34 Antiochus I., 23 n., 28 IH. the Great, 28-30, 70, 72 IV. Epiphanes, 48, 73- 78,80-82,86,89, 90, 101,112,119, 138 V. Eupator, 91-93 VI. Dionysus, 106-108 VII. Sidetes, 103, no- 112 IX. Cyzicenus, 114 Antipas (i) governor of Idumaea, 135 (2) Herod, 154 Antipater (i) father of Herod, 135, 137-141, 144, 145 (2) son of Herod, 154 Antony, Mark, 139, 140, I45-M7 Apamea, 106 Apollonius (i), general defeated by Judas, 89 (2) governor of Ccele- Syria, 103 Arabia, 24; Arabs, 12; see also Nabataans Arak-el-Emir, 48 Archelaus, son of Herod, 154 Aretas EL, king of the Naba- tseans, 135 1 64 INDEX Aristobulus (i) I. (Judas), 1 14-1 16, 126, 127 (2) II., 133-135, 137, 138, 140, 142, U5, H7 (3) son of Herod and Mariamne, I48 } 153, 154 M (4) brother of Mari. amne, high- priest, 155 Aristotle, 20, 32 Armenia, 89, 136 Arvad (Aradus), 13 Ascalon, 13, 32, 38, 47, 104 Ashdod (Azotus), 13, 104 Asia Minor, 3, 16, 17, 23, 24, 25, 103, 128, 136 Assyrians, 14, 15, 17 Athens, 73, 151 Augustus, see Ctesor, Octavianus Augustus Azotus, see Ashdod Babas, sons of, 148 Babylon, 3, 4, 17, 24, 31, 32, 146, 147, I 55J tk Babylonian Em- pire, 86 ; Babylonia, 1 10 Bacchides, 94, 96 Balas, see Alexander Balas Balkan Peninsula, 16, 17, 33 .BaZ&Ji, 17 Barkocheba, revolt of, 2 Bashan, 127 Beluchistan, 17 Ben-Sira, Jeshua (Jesus the son of Sirach), 11, 49~68, 7 J?eroa (Chaleb, Aleppo), 34 Beth - hammidrash (school of scribes), 50 Beth-shan, 115; see Scythopolis Beth-sur, 89, 107 Beth-Zachariah, 92 Black Sea, 18 Bokhara, 17, 23 Bosra, 91 Brahmins, 43 Brutus, Marcus, 139, 145 (7a*ar, Julius, 139-141 Caesar, Octavianus, later Augustus, 139, 145, 147, I49I5I, 154, 155 Ccesarea^ 149 Callirhoe, 154 Gappadocia, 101 Carmel, Mount, 127 Caspian Sea, 17 Cassius, 139-141, H5 Chaleb (Aleppo) 34 Cleopatra, 24, 147 Ccele-Syria, 25 ; see Palestine Crassus, Marcus, 139, 140 Cretan mercenaries of Demetrius n., 103, 104, 105 Crimea, 136 Gyrus, 2, 16 Dagon, temple of, 104 Damascus, 28, 32, 39, 107, 129, 136, 137, 150 Daniel, book of, 28, 30, 76, 84-87, 118 Darius Codomannus, 15-17 David, tomb of, 115; house of David, Davidic kingdom, 5, 6, 12, 13, 113, 143, 156; Son of David, 144 Delta, 22 Demetrius I. Soter, 73, 93, 94, 96, 101-103 TL Nicator, 103-108, 112 III. Eukairos, 129 Diaspora (Dispersion), 43, 44, 152 Dionysus, 95 Dok, in INDEX 165 Ecbatana, 31 Ecclesiastes, book of, 49 Ecclesiasticus, book of, see Ben- Sira Edomites, 12, 113; see Idumcea, Antipater, Herod Egypt, 12, 17, 21, 22, 23-25, 43, 44, 46, 47, 80, 81, 94, 139, HO #&r !59; dues of the Priests, 9-1 1 Proverbs, book of, 49, 56, 62 Ptolertiais (Acco), 34, 101, 102, 107 Ptolemies, generally, 45-48, 77, 127; Ptolemy I. Soter, 21-23, 25-27 ; Pt. II. Philadelphia, 22, 28; Pt. LEI. Energetes, 28; Pt. IV. Philopator, 29; Pt. V. Epiphanes, 29 ; Pt. VIL Philo- metor, 80, 101, 102, 104; Pt. XIV., 140 Ptolemy (i) governor of Coele- Syria, 89 (2) son of Abub, 1 1 1 Pythagoreans, 43 Raphia, battle of, 29 Red Sea, 22 Rhodes, 151 Rome, 72, 73, 75, 93, 107, 134, 136, 145, 146; Roman traders, 13 Sabayya, 6 Sabbath day, 27, 121, 122, 138 Sadducees, 121, 124-126, 130, 133, 143, 146, 155, 158, 159 Salome (i) Alexandra, see Alex- andra (2) sister of Herod, 153, 157, 158 Samaria, 34, 105, 114, 149 Samaritans, 4, 14, 15, 113, 114 Samarkand, 17 Sameas, 156 Sanballat, 15 Sanhedrin, 6 Sardis, 24 Sarim, 6 Scopas, 29, 30 Scribes, 49, 50, 122-125 Scythopolis, 47, 115 Sebaste, see Samaria Seganim, 6 i68 INDEX Seir, Mount, 12, 13 Seleucid Dynasty, 23, 86, 100, 112, 127, 136 Seleucia, 24 Seleucus I. Nicator, 22, 23, 25, 28, 34 II. Kallinikos, 28 IV. Philopator, 70, 72, 73,93 Senate, see Gerusia Septuagint, 44, 87; for Ecdesias- ticus, see Ben-Sira Seron, 89 Seven Brethren, the, 83 Shechem, 15, 113, 114, 129 Shushan, see &wsa MOW, 13, 25, 32, 38 Simeon the Righteous, 69, 70, 72 Simon (i), Jewish notable under Seleucus IV., 73 (2) the Hasmonaean, 96, 100, 107-111 Sirach, see Ben-Sira Solomon, 157; Psalms of Solomon t 141-144 Solymius, 47 Sophervm, see Scribes Sophocles, 37 Sosius, Gaius, 146 Sparta, 151 Straton's-Tower (Csesarea), 147 149 Successors, the (of Alexander), 21 3, 17 Synedrion, see Sanhedrin Syria, under Persian Empire, 3, 12, 14; conquered by Alex- ander, 17; under Seleucids, 24, 25 ; old cities of Syria, 32 ; Syria Hellenised, 33, 34, 38, 41 ; under Seleucus IV., 72 ; under Anti- ochus IV., 76, 8 1 ; Jewish colonies in Syria, 91 ; Syria under Lysias, 93 ; under Deme- trius II., 105, 112; conquered by the Armenians, 136; a Roman province, 1 38 ; occupied by Cassius, 141 ; Ccele- Syria, see Palestine Tabor, Mount, 140 Tetrarch, title, 145, 154 Tigranes, 136 Timur, 16 Tirshatha, title, 5 Tobiah, sons of, 45 Trade routes, 12, 13, 22, 24 Trumdh, 9, 1 1 Tryphon, 106-108, no, in 13, 17, 25, 32, 38 Wisdom, personified, 60, 6l ; " Wisdom " literature, 49 Zadok, 124 Zerubbabel, 5, 152 Zeus, 78, 82 Z'kenim, 6 THE END RETURN TO the circulation desk of any University of California Library or to the NORTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY Bldg. 400, Richmond Field Station University of California Richmond, CA 94804-4698 ALL BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS 2-month loans may be renewed by calling (415)642-6233 1-year loans may be recharged by bringing books to NRLF Renewals and recharges may be made 4 days prior to due date DUE AS STAMPED BELOW AUTODISCORC JUN13tM AUTO DISC CIRC JUKI 5 APR LD 2l-lOOw-8,'34 U. 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